Offline with Jon Favreau - Did Clickbait Kill Buzzfeed and the Digital Media Era?

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

Ben Smith, Semafor founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Buzzfeed News, joins Offline to discuss what the shuttering of newsrooms at Buzzfeed and Vice means for the future of journalism. Ben’s new book, Traffic, traces the rise and fall of the digital media era. He and Jon talk about the personalities and publications that caused this phenomenon, the value of clickbait, and how the race to go viral was doomed from the start. Then, Jon and Max Fisher reunite to recap their week without iPhones and introduce next week’s Unplug Challenge. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Do you have a vision of a new internet? I mean, I just think the internet itself is clearly sort of falling apart. Like, I mean, just, I mean, I think we're in a very, very weird moment where people are splintering. I mean, people, I think, in reaction to all the things we're talking about, are not looking for these huge public spaces or looking for voices they trust. Often, there's a lot of medium, really successful, kind of, I would say, medium-sized media companies, this one included. Some of it podcasts, some of it newsletters, a lot that's going kind of directly to people who are interested in, you know, in new information and in sorting through everything that's out there. I mean,

I think internet is a funny word for it. Like, I'm not sure it's all happening on the world wide web, I think. Yeah, I think it's a sort of much more splintered landscape in a way that we're not used to. And it means you don't always know what everybody else is talking about or thinking. And I don't know, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Offline. I'm sure some of you are wondering how my week without an iPhone went. The answer is surprisingly great. But more on that later. First up is a conversation I had with Ben Smith, founder of Semaphore and

former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. The last couple of weeks have felt like the end of a very specific era online. Media companies that once defined the internet, like Vice News and BuzzFeed News, have shut down. And a lot of people at other media companies have lost their jobs as well. Some of these outlets were supposed to upend legacy media as we knew it. But now the future of the entire digital media industry is at best uncertain. So what happened? How did places like BuzzFeed and Huffington Post go from digital media giants to shuttered newsrooms? And what does that mean for journalism and the internet going forward?

Ben tries to answer these questions in his book Traffic by going back to the beginning of the digital media era and following the personalities and publications that set it off. He identifies the red flags the industry missed and makes what I think is a pretty persuasive case that the race to go viral and chase traffic was doomed from the start. So the two of us sat down to talk about all the ways digital media changed journalism, the last good day online, the role big platforms like Facebook played in these companies' demise, and why Ben thinks the next era of the internet is going to be very different and a lot more fractured than the one we just went through.

It was a great conversation, and I was very happy to spend my phone-free week reading traffic. As always, if you have comments, questions, or concerns, please email us at offlineatcricket.com and stick around after the interview. Max and I float into the studio to recap our very pleasant week without iPhones and reveal what offline challenge we'll be taking on next to fight our phone addictions. Here's Ben Smith. Ben Smith, welcome to Offline. Thanks so much for having me. So my first thought when I finished your book about the rise and fall of digital media is that the epilogue to the paperback edition is really going to write itself. You release traffic in the middle of what feels like the end of the digital media era, BuzzFeed News, where you were editor-in-chief for a decade,

Vice, lots of layoffs at other digital and legacy media companies. You write about a lot of the red flags over the last decade, which I know are easier to see in retrospect. But do you remember when you started realizing that the industry would likely end up where it is today? I'm not sure I had so much foresight that I saw like this much kind of gloom and doom. But I do think it was the notion that social media, which was the sort of ocean we were swimming in,

wasn't going to work out the way we thought it would, really was 2016. Because I think this wasn't like a technical media thing. This was a big cultural shift around politics and society that produced Donald Trump, which was a surprise to many of us, as you may recall. No, I mean, I knew that was coming, of course. When did you think that the financial model that this was all based in might be in trouble? Oh, so, you know, I think that like I had been a political reporter my whole career. And this is all much clearer in retrospect to me. Like I definitely started at BuzzFeed thinking, well, like these smart finance guys are pouring all this money in and want us to do news. That's why I'm here. And so I wasn't

going in as sort of saying, like, let me question their assumptions. But I think, you know, it wasn't so much, there were, you know, many, many things went wrong. And I think there were real management mistakes that I made, that Jonah made, that could have softened the blow. Although, as you see, it's sort of across the ecosystem. It's not like anybody's doing great. But there was basically, like, there was one really big bet, which went wrong, which was that the people who were, particularly people who were investing in this new world,

what they were looking at was, like, Viacom. They were looking at MTV, which had come, you know, some companies laid cable in the ground in the 80s and then turned around and said, we need stuff for these cables. So, like, what about, you know, there's MTV, there's ESPN, there's CNN.

There's a whole new wave of great media companies that thrive in this new ecosystem. The people operating the cables don't love paying out cash to these companies every month, but get that their whole ecosystem depends on having really good distribution and really good content. And so that was the analogy that everybody investing in that digital space was thinking about. There are these new pipes, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, whatever, they're going to last for a long time as they start to compete with each other more and more fiercely. And to compete with everything else in the world, they're going to need really high quality premium content. They're going to pay the people who make it and who make the stuff that's kind of purpose

built for them. They're going to pay them. They're going to need those companies to succeed. So, there'll be like a regular tug of war over revenue, but ultimately, it'll be a healthy media ecosystem. And that just absolutely didn't happen in any way. Why didn't it happen? You know, I think there are two theories on this. One is that we were totally delusional. It was never going to happen. That was an insane thing to think. The other is that executives, particularly Mark Zuckerberg, thought about it and decided probably for two reasons not

to do it. One is that user-generated content is free. That's great. Free is great. I mean, it's a much higher profit margin business when all your content is free. And two is that news in particular, as 2016 comes through, has become so toxic that like the notion that you as Facebook are going to try to build yourself into a news service is just inherently like a partisan exercise that gets you hauled in front of Congress some more and is an incredibly distracting thing from what you see as your core business. I mean, I do think there's a subsidiary question, which is like, has this worked out? Have the choices Facebook made worked out for them particularly well? No. Doesn't necessarily seem so, yeah. And, you know, and the other social networks like Twitter is actually, you know, as we're talking, finally doing what is becoming a media company.

A television company, a television company particularly. Yeah, we're talking like an hour after the news broke that Tucker Carlson will be taking his show to Twitter. How's that even going to work? I mean, like any video thing works. You put it on a service, you charge people for it, you take a percentage of the revenue. I could imagine it being a pretty decent medium-sized business like The Daily Wire. Yeah. Will that be like the first sort of political talk show that's on Twitter exclusively? You know, there was a moment when Twitter was trying to, had an earlier iteration of Twitter. They thought maybe we'll become television and they started syndicating television shows,

AM to DM, which BuzzFeed produced. Oh, yeah, that's right. Which was a lighthearted and political sort of morning show, which had political elements on Twitter, engaged with Twitter. But I think as you know, the Tucker Carlson show is a different alternative for that. But it is this incredible, incredibly scaled down ambition, honestly, from global public square, where by the way, everything is free. And so it's an incredible business to like, medium sized conservative television network, which actually seems like a totally plausible way to go. I thought you made a fairly persuasive case in the book

that like the ad-supported model for media companies like BuzzFeed is sort of at the core of the problem because the race for traffic in some ways was always going to lead you guys there because there were more companies looking for more traffic and trying to get more clicks um it it just it diluted the power of each view each click yeah so does it was there any alternative path for buzzfeed looking back

that you guys you think you could have taken that would have made it more sustainable yeah i mean on the first point i think right every but there was this sort of core mistake that lots of media companies made in the aughts that right that well we're you know we're getting nine dollars for a thousand views in in 2003 for these rudimentary ads on gawker like well and we've discovered essentially this new commodity that gives us nine dollars a view and if we can create more views we can just multiply that out and we're all going to be rich, right? Yeah. And then it turns out, well, that's actually not a commodity.

Because the thing about commodities is there's a limited supply. Right. And what you have is just a webpage, you know. And there's infinite supply essentially. And so those numbers instead of going up start going down. And that is a huge problem with traffic. Although, I mean, as you guys know, as anybody in this business knows, the advertising business is complicated. It's not impossible to run a media company based on advertising and other revenue. And I do think, you know, for,

you know, BuzzFeed News in particular, like that's the thing I sort of fault myself most for in retrospect, should have pivoted pretty hard toward a different kind of business. You know, news companies that do advertising present themselves to advertisers differently, basically, than big entertainment companies. And that's something we didn't figure out while I was there. Early on in the book, you have this quote from Gawker founder Nick Denton from years and years ago. He said, you can't pretend to yourself that people actually have highfalutin taste. Nobody ever searches for inequality in America. This is something you come back to a few times in the book, sort of the old media practice of

determining what audiences ought to like versus giving them what they actually like. How do you think about that balance now? Like, do you think the digital media era swung the pendulum too far towards just giving people what they want? You know, obviously media has always felt this push and pull. There's always, I mean, one of the great origin stories of American newspaper journalism, the New York Sun, their breakthrough moment was the moon hoax in which they published a series of stories saying that they had found flying humans on the moon.

And basically. And you have to correct me if I've misstated that slightly. It's not like the internet invented the pressure to pander to your audience and make stuff up. It's just like, you've been flying without instruments, and suddenly, like, you just could exquisitely see exactly what people wanted and what they didn't. And, you know, to a point, that's valuable. You don't want to be writing stuff people don't read. You want to be writing things people are interested in. And I think I always felt in that ecosystem, I'm sure made lots of mistakes,

but what we were trying to do was sort of be conscious and thoughtful about what people wanted, but not follow it to its logical conclusion, basically. Right. Yeah, that's, well, I mean, it is tough now that I have a media company. Yeah. Because I could complain about this a lot when I was on the political side.

But, you know, we can tell when we do Pod Save America, right? Like there's big Trump news and you put Trump in the headline and you talk a lot about Trump. Like that's going to get a lot of people are going to listen to that. But then there's like, well, there's a whole bunch of other important things happening in the world. There's a lot of things happening in states under the radar that we want people to know about. And so I feel like it's a constant sort of push and pull between like, okay, we know that the audience wants this and this is fun and it needs to be somewhat entertaining and people need to listen to it or else, you know, they're never going to digest it. But then you're also like, I can't just, we can't give them all fun

stuff because, you know, well, for us, we have a mission a mission right that we're trying to uh make sure people understand what the what the problems are in the country and what they can do to fix them but like how often do you how often did you think about that when you were at buzzfeed like because obviously you guys did some fantastic journalism while you were there and how did you how did you deal with figuring out like i have all this data about what's going viral, what's working, versus I actually want to do a story about this, and maybe it won't be as exciting for some people. Yeah, we thought about it all the time, and we're trying to balance it all the time. But the thing is, when I started in 2012, there was this two- or three-year period where I think you could fool yourself into thinking, or maybe not fool yourself, maybe it was true for a minute. Huh, like Twitter in particular is this incredibly, like, glorious new frontier for news, where people who care a lot about news are on there scouring for new information.

And if you break a story, it'll go viral. It'll travel a lot. So, scoops, which are a very, you know, essentially news, is a great way to feed that beast and get traffic and, you know, build audience and your brand. And you're not really making compromises. What you're doing is telling people something new. I think that as Facebook really became the only and central platform, it was never a place, it was a place where the most extreme versions of telling people what they wanted to hear did best. The most and the purest version of that was like the Macedonian teenagers

with a fake website telling people that Hillary Clinton had been replaced by a body double. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. We spent a lot of time on this show debating how much these social media algorithms are affecting human behavior and how much they're just reflecting human behavior. Like, where do you come down on that? I come to, yes, I would say yes to that question. I mean, I do think, I think, you know, in a big picture way, I think when you look,

particularly the big story that people talk about in this context is the rise of Donald Trump. Yeah. I think there was a period in the, you know, late 2016, early 2017, when a lot of people really came to believe that not just Facebook, but Cambridge Analytica and some slightly hard to explain, mysterious dark arts around Facebook had gotten Donald Trump

elected. I think you look at how enduring his appeal is and the fact that people like Donald Trump got elected in countries all over the world. And clearly there was a real surge of right-wing populism that was not about like micro-technical things happening in the United States or on the Trump campaign, but it was also definitely wound around Facebook in lots of different places. Again, not totally, not every country has the same Facebook penetration. I don't think, I don't think you can like just say, oh, history has this one cause, but, you know, but certainly that kind of right-wing populism was incredibly well adapted to Facebook because, you know, it was the things

that social media was sort of good at, which is tearing down institutions and sort of giving a signal of where an angry group of people wants to go. And, you know, and it gave politicians and publishers who wanted to go there this very clear signal to follow, which I think, you know, Trump and Breitbart say followed. Yeah, I was wondering about this, because, you know, you sort of end the book. And you say, you know, at this point, the internet had become merely society itself, the forces that had come to dominate it, populism to the right and the left, most of all, were social forces, not digital ones. And I do wonder, because throughout the rest of the book, you've written about how, you know, there are specific decisions made by people at social media platforms and digital media companies that really supercharge that populism, especially right wing populism, as part of this competition for attention. And I want like those decisions seem like.

Yeah, I think no, I think those decisions really matter. I mean, if you're asking me sort of where are we now? I mean, I think that's that's you know, it's these things aren't easily disentangled, but they were certainly particularly at Facebook and to some degree at Twitter and particularly in like 2015, 16, 17, 18. There are these specific choices. Essentially, first to say, well, let's, you know, let's amplify the stuff people are hitting like on. If you like this, then she'll probably like this and we'll show it to her even though her friends didn't share it and things.

And the problem was that that produced Hillary Clinton's body double. And so Facebook is then like, well, this doesn't quite work. How about engagement? Now, we want to have people have not just some drive-by interaction with the headline. We want people who are meaningfully engaged with this content. And so what that means is you share a Trump meme, I write kill yourself 17 times in a row. And the system is like, this is some profound engagement. This is great. Let's show it to everyone. And that really did, I think, help drive division,

I think, particularly racial division. I think there was a kind of content that was like a, and BuzzFeed would sometimes do identity posts about, you know, what it's like to grow up Persian in New Jersey was one, right? Like very like specific that were kind of fun in jokes for a community. And then like for their friends, you know, kind of an insight into them growing up in New Jersey. You take that and you show it to everyone. And you may be in, you know, in other contexts, in more racially charged sort of context. And people outside that in circle of the inside joke, see it as a racist attack on them. Comment to that effect. The algorithm is like, this is great. Let's show it to more people. And I do think, I mean, we definitely, there's a, in the book, there's a, you know, Jonah Spready, the CEO of BuzzFeed, had a running conversation with the people,

with Zuckerberg and the people running Facebook in 2018. He had an urgent email to them saying the only stuff that is traveling on Facebook is content that can be misinterpreted as racist and is being taken as racist. And that's what works on Facebook now. I've talked to so many people about this. And, you know, I think there's an idea. A lot of liberals think that sometimes if we just tweak the algorithms, like we can fix this problem. Everybody will just calm right down. Right.

And then you talk to people and they're like, well, a lot of times Facebook did tweak the algorithm, just as you talked about over the years. First, they prioritize sharing, engagement. And it seems like every time someone tries to tweak the algorithm, there's some unintended consequence that makes it even worse or presents a series of different problems. I talked to Charlie Warzel, who I know you know very well. And he was like, I just don't think people are meant to be connected at this scale. Just period. Do you think that? I think that most people now think that, right?

Like these systems are falling apart. I think people like trying it out. This thing where we're all in the same giant room screaming at each other at the top of our lungs and thought that was fun for a while. And that the culture has clearly sort of moved on and rejected it mostly. And people are retreating to smaller spaces. And I think that, I don't know, they didn't like the thing before either, where we just got our news from the New York Times and they had screwed up the Iraq war coverage, right? I mean, I think it's easy to say.

Like the pendulum swings one way or the other. Yeah, the pendulum swings and you're reacting to what society actually wants. You talked about the internet's last good day, which involved the famous dress. Is it blue or black or white and gold? Why was that such a big deal for BuzzFeed? And I found it very interesting. Why was Facebook so concerned about the dress going viral? Yeah, that day was March of 15, I guess.

And I would say like the other great thing that happened that day, if any of your listeners recall, was that some llamas got loose in Arizona. I had forgotten about that until I read it in your book. And we all just sort of gathered around and watched these hapless police officers chase them around. But right. So what was this was essentially like a fun and harmless piece of popular culture that began when a woman goes to a wedding, I believe in like Western Scotland, comes home with a picture of somebody wearing a dress and she and her mom have a disagreement about what color the dress is, which feels insane. And so she sends a Tumblr message to BuzzFeed to say, hey, can you sort this out for us? And the woman who's running our social media takes a look at it and everyone's gathered around her computer arguing about it. And so she thinks, I will show this to our readers and post this thing. And it within, I mean, I remember a colleague of mine was giving a speech in Jakarta

and like an hour after it was published and he got off stage, he was like, all anybody was asking me about was this dress that you published in New York an hour earlier. And it was this instant moment of global culture that everyone was talking about. And it was this instant moment of global culture that everyone was talking about. And it was like one of these kind of fun scientific brain teasery things, like very divisive in the most literal sense, like two thirds of people saw it one way, one third the other. People like to argue about it, all those Facebook mechanisms that like feed off division, loved it. But it was totally harmless and delightful. Yeah, like divisive in the best sense.

Yeah, exactly. Like sports, right? Like one of these cultural conflicts where we can, you know. Anyway, very fun. And we just thought like, this is great. Like this is a new kind, this is like the culmination, not the culmination, a beautiful example of this new global digital culture where everybody around the world is talking about the same stuff in a totally lovely, harmless way. And a bit later, Jonah runs into a senior person at Facebook and says, basically, it wasn't that cool. And they said to him, how often do you think we should let that happen? Which, of course, a reminder of like, oh, they were letting it happen, right?

But also, I think if you were working at that company, it wasn't just that you were tweaking the dials here and tweaking them there and manipulating society. Mostly, you were tweaking the dials here and tweaking them there and manipulating society. Mostly, you were tweaking the dials here, tweaking the dials there, and staring into the abyss and wondering what would happen next. This is a vast system with everyone on it that is not really under your control as an algorithm. I mean, you can tweak the dials, but it's not totally unlike the Fed managing the economy. You tweak the dials, you wait eight months and see what happens. I did look back at that

and I was thinking, is there a version of the internet? Can we ever get back to some place where we're arguing over fun stuff like that? Silly stuff like that?

Like what, what happened? I mean, obviously that was 2015. So Donald Trump's, I mean, society actually got a lot more divided

and angrier. Yeah. But I do think there are corners at the end i mean i think reddit is remains a very like interesting counter example to everything else that happened on social media society definitely got more divisive but i do think that this is part of what caused it like i think that all of us being online all the time yeah and specifically social media and the fact that we're seeing tweets and posts that don't have context and we're hearing the loudest voices amplified and the most divisive content amplified. Like when people's information diet is constantly all of this garbage, why wouldn't we be a more divided society? Yeah. And there's a mechanism that I think of as more

Twitter than Facebook, but where that is basically you're constantly shown the stupidest version of what your enemies think. Like the most extreme and insane thing that conservatives say is no doubt constantly at the top of your Twitter feed and a screenshot from someone you've never heard of. Yes. And it makes it in the political realm, I think it makes it more difficult for people to understand like what's on voters minds because people who tend to spend a lot of time online and consume a lot of news only are exposed to like Democratic partisans with super strong views, Republican partisans with super strong and the extremes on both sides. And they actually don't know that most voters have like super complicated views and they have like cross-cutting ideologies and some of them don't pay much attention to news and so some of them don't have opinions at all. And so you start to think that the other side

is like constantly at war with you and the partisans are, but majority of the people in the country, majority of voters in the country just like don't really think about this stuff. I'm obviously interested in the political implications of the digital media era. You write that you hadn't realized until you started reporting for this book, the extent to which right-wing populism was always looking over the shoulder of the progressive internet scene learning its lessons. What lessons do you think right-wing populists

learn from progressives? So, I mean, I think you have to sort of get your head back to that early, you know, the 2000 to 2010 in New York, where all these people were Huffington Post, maybe the purest version. They have like a meeting after the 2004 election, like we cannot lose again, and create this website that is largely winds up being an arm of the Obama campaign, basically. But, you know, a lot of, I would say, like, broadly, these are young people on the basically. But, you know, a lot of, I would say, like, broadly, these are young people on the internet. So, of course, they support Barack Obama. That's his demographic. Like, you know, and so, and it's taken almost for granted that the internet is a pro-Obama place. You know, Obama visits Facebook in 2011. He doesn't have to say, I'm here because you get out Democratic votes. Like, college kids are on Facebook. It's like

visiting a campus. Like, of course, they've got, you know. Well, we were in the demographics or destiny era. Yes, yes. When I went back to report out the book, what kind of like actually surprised me was, well, all of not just the ideas, but like the people who would be central to the next decade. And I think when you look back this whole era of the internet, you know, the founder of 4chan worked out of BuzzFeed's office. Andrew Breitbart co-founds HuffPost.

Steve Bannon is very interested and involved in looking over the shoulder of all this stuff. Gavin McInnes, who created the Proud Boys, is the co-founder of Vice. Like, these aren't incidental characters, and it's not sort of incidental that they're there. But I think we, who were in the sort of mainstream media, thought we were the main story. But the thing is, like, Obama-era liberalism, like, had a little populist edge. You know, the Dean campaign was populist. But it was not a follow the populist energy to its logical conclusion movement at all.

It was like, just drink deeply enough to get yourself elected, and then let's, you know, go talk to Tim Geithner. So, I don't mean if you object here, but so... My buddy Tim Geithner like that. But I think the thing about that next decade is Steve Bannon, Breitbart, like really see that these measures of traffic, these notions about like thinking about content in terms of like what can you make that people will be most likely to post to Facebook, that if you just follow the heat to its logical extreme, you know, that the and if you don't, and if you take the sort of other cues that go with this kind of right wing populism, you are anti institutional sort of by nature, you lie in order to provoke

a reaction to your lies, you know, you sort of are transgressive in this deliberate way that is meant to signal that you're like, not with the in crowd, you're one of, you know, this is very like set of things that aren't really about Facebook, that are about this style of politics, but just sync up so well with social media. And we, you know, BuzzFeed, we were always, we could see, for instance, that Bernie Sanders got more traffic than Hillary Clinton. But also, we were professional journalists, and we weren't going to like, torque what we were writing. We might write more about him, if people were really interested, but we're not going to just, you know, we're not going to lie about her and lie about him in order to get more traffic. Breitbart had no problem doing that. Breitbart just followed that signal

straight to its logical conclusion. And I think basically, you know, inherited the earth in a way because they were just totally committed to this style of communication in a way that everybody who had sort of helped create it and think about it and build all the dashboards didn't really want to think through the conclusion. I actually thought about that with how you wrote about Gawker. Like, to me, the attitude that fueled Gawker and Denton at the beginning, which was very like, let's get rid of the gatekeepers, let's take on institutions, smash hierarchies, that kind of, there was a populism to that. Oh, yeah. And Andrew Breitbart had created his sites based on Gawker. Like that was the model.

And I was thinking about like that, because taken to its logical extreme, you get to either sort of the right wing extremism of Benny Johnson, or Baked Alaska that you write about, or just the nihilism that was sort of late stage Gawker in a way. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, Gawker did, again, really did in some ways follow that to this previous ideology, just of exposing everything, of ripping the mask off everything. Just taking it all down, just burning it all down.

And there is a sort of very literal sense in which the logical conclusion of that is sex tapes. It's funny, I worked for, I ran into a woman last night here, great reporter, former reporter, whose first job was at Defamer, their site called Defamer.

I mean, it was like, they were obviously playing with fire, but, yeah, I always had an issue with that,

because, you know, I know there was a lot of like, oh, we're so sad Gawker's gone, and I think they did some good stuff, but there was a lot of,

sometimes I think there was meanness that was justified as like, oh, we're just taking on power. And it's important to take on power and hold power accountable and take on institutions. But sometimes it was just like, it seemed like they were just doing it for fun, which became what, I mean, this is what a lot of the right wing media assholes do now. It's complicated because obviously they did sometimes take on power, but they did it in sort of sometimes stupid, mean ways. Like, they were mean to Peter Thiel about being gay, and he then developed an insane

secret conspiracy to destroy them that helped lead to their destruction. I mean, what's the lesson of that? I don't know. Or I had forgotten until you wrote about that CFO that they... Right, the sort of, the end point of it in a way or one of the end points was exposing really a totally random mid-level or mid-senior employee of condé Nast which is not a major important American company yeah that he was like having you know that he was doing stuff in his personal life that was embarrassing right who

cares and and yeah and I think that was sort of a, I think part of it was sort of, it's one thing like in early, early Gawker days, you know, they had a staff of like one or two mostly young women who were total outsiders to New York, great writers, captured the moment, did like weird stuff, like sneaking into the Condé Nast cafeteria and writing about it, what it was like, but they were outsiders. They had no power. These media companies they were making fun of had enormous power. It felt like there's something that's sort of acceptable. The media companies that they're attacking and the other institutions start to fall apart.

They get more powerful and important. And suddenly, what are you doing? You're just being mean. You're not punching up. Not that you should just necessarily be punching in any case. You end the book with sort of a big question that I think about all the time, which is over this decade, sort of faith in every institution has been degraded and partly as a result of some of these forces that you write about. And so you have a public that has very little faith in institutions and yet is demanding that those same institutions explain what's going on in the world around them with accuracy and truth.

Like, how do we get out of that? Have you thought about like, what, what do you do to sort of, you know, get people's faith in institutions back? I mean, I don't know, but that is, I mean, to me, that was sort of my slightly like surprising to me conclusion because I had spent my whole career like on the outside. I mean, I know you were always working for the greater glory of the democratic party of course but a lot of people of our generation were skeptical of institutions and i mean yeah actually and a lot of your career was you know i mean the obama campaign was yeah i mean there was a lot of but certainly i came up looking at the sort of mainstream media and thinking wow

these people have are totally disconnected from how people communicate on the internet in the early 2000s. And they've totally blown the biggest story of our lives. So why should we have any confidence in them? You know, I think, but it's also obviously just totally evident that the crisis of this moment is in part about this total lack of faith in all institutions, many of which are failing people. But I don't know. I mean, I think you, at least, it's sort of weird to say out loud, like, I'm really excited about institutions. That's not something anybody really gets excited about. But it obviously, to some degree, is like the project for people of our generation, right, to try to build new ones and also find ways to kind of patch up the old ones, right? To the degree possible. I think it's the biggest challenge there is. It's especially, I think, a challenge for

progressives, for Democrats, because we're the people who are trying to build institutions or have people make sure that people have faith in institutions because for progressivism to work, government has to work and stuff like that. But the easiest, from a political standpoint, the easiest campaign to run is a purely populist campaign where you start yelling about CEOs and elites and rich people. Populism works politically. And a lot of these institutions really haven't adapted to a media environment

really broadly where you just can't hide stuff so well anymore, where if you screw up, everybody sees it. And it's not, I mean, I think about this with media institutions. I was, you know, I started my career, my first gig after college was the Indianapolis Star in the summer of 99. And, you know, if there was an, I was covering murder, I was on the, I was in the cop's desk. And if somebody, you know, if somebody, there was a murder, you would get some partial information. You might have the wrong name of the person. You might have the wrong address. You might have the wrong victim's name, the wrong killer's name.

You might have the method. You might have everything wrong. And you're running around trying to get all this stuff. And you're knocking on the wrong door or the wrong house and, like, having some really awful conversation with strangers. But by the end of the day, you've pieced most of this together and the police have gotten their acts together and given you some information. And the story that runs the next day, you read the story and you're like, oh, these people really know what they're doing. But now it's like you see journalists running around like idiots all day trying to figure out what was going on, just like you and regular people can often do a better

job because there's no magic to it. And you're like, wow, these people are all idiots. And in fact, the truth is we were always all idiots. It's just, you couldn't see it. And I think that's true of the CDC, of most of these institutions. And I don't know how you kind of reestablish faith in these things that never really deserved the faith that was put in them in the first place, right? No. And it's, look, when I'm, when we're explaining something that's happening in government on the pod, because, and we're giving our perspective, like, as people who are in government, you always feel like an asshole trying to defend the institution. Because the frustration is legitimate. It's real. A lot of it is warranted with a lot of the skepticism is warranted.

And I think the question is how you keep the skepticism healthy and keep it from turning into cynicism. Because then if it's cynicism, then it's like, well, it's all a game and it's rigged and who cares? I'm never going to trust the media. I'm never going to trust government. And that's that. But if you keep it, if you keep a healthy skepticism, then you're holding power accountable, but you're getting people to still believe that it's possible for it to work. Yeah. That in media and government, these are a bunch of idiots like you who are mostly trying to do their best and occasionally getting things done.

Right, right. You write at the end of the book about Nick Denton's vision of a new internet. Do you have a vision of a new internet? I mean, I think the notion, I mean, I just think the internet itself is clearly sort of falling apart. Like, I mean, just, I mean,

I think we're in a very, very weird moment where people are splintering. I mean, people, I think, in reaction to all the things we're talking about are not looking for these huge public spaces or looking for voices they trust. Often, there's a lot of medium, really successful, kind of, I would say, medium-sized media companies, this one included. You know, some of it podcasts, some of it newsletters, a lot that's going kind of directly to people who are interested in, you know, in new information and in sorting through everything that's out there. And at Semaphore, that's sort of what

we're trying to do too, is to build around individual voices to, you know, to not project our views as the only possible view, but to include sort of a lot of different points of view and interpretations of shared facts. But I don't, I mean, I think internet is a funny word for it. I'm not sure it's all happening on the World Wide web, I think. I think it's a much more splintered landscape in a way that we're not used to. And it means you don't always know what everybody else is talking about or thinking. And I don't know, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. It's honestly, I don't think it is the worst thing in the world. Just having been off my phone for a week as part of a challenge for this podcast. I was like,

usually before Pod Save America on Thursday, I'm like spending like four or five hours before the pod, just like ingesting every piece of information and every take that I can. And I didn't do that on last Thursday because I didn't have my phone. And instead I just like sat quietly and thought about the news and what I thought about the news. And it was fine. And in some ways, it was better. I was like, oh, maybe I don't have to synthesize every single take that's out there or read every single piece of news. And I do wonder if we're like heading into an era where there's a little less connection, a little less of us being online all the time, if that's a good thing. It certainly feels that way to me. I mean, I've noticed in my weird little obsessive world of

people who are obsessed with scoops, which is my personal community, that I, you know, it used to be there was this central scoreboard where you kind of knew who got broke which story. And I was sending furious emails last week off because my colleague, Louise Matsakis, had broken a great story about Chinese internet companies and nobody had credited her. And then as I was doing that, noticed that I had just published a story by Max Taney, a great scoop, I thought, about a media company. And in fact, somebody else had broken it an hour earlier, and we hadn't noticed. Because that system of like, you are seeing everything all the time on a single scoreboard is sort of fragmenting and fracturing and harder to use. And you go to, I mean, Twitter was sort of the scoreboard. Now you go there and you just, it's just talking about itself. And

sometimes it's actually like extremely entertaining and interesting and riveting, but it's really about what happens in late stage sort of apocalyptic Twitter, not what's happening in the Middle East and what's happening in media and what's happening in the world. And I think, yeah, I don't know. I sort of agree. I don't, you know, I don't know what's healthier, what's unhealthier, like the world could certainly get worse. Yeah. But certainly it's in reaction to what we all just went through. What do you think the most sustainable business model is for journalism moving forward?

Do you think it's subscription? So I have such strong views on this. They're so boring. I'm interested. I've been doing this a long time and my partner, Justin Smith, probably the most successful entrepreneur in this. And it is diversified revenue. If you look at Disney, what business is Disney in? They have 13 business lines. They manage them all very carefully.

Parks is great. I mean, I think that news in particular is a really tough business. And you should have very strong views about what journalism is, what you're producing, how you connect your readers, and be, very agnostic about where the money comes from, as long as it doesn't compromise the journalism. And I think people, you've seen people get themselves into trouble by being like, I believe in subscriptions the way like, I believe in God, I don't know, you know, like, it's just a way of, it's a business model. And the successful companies over the years have mixed models. And it's a very boring answer, but it's actually like... It's a good...

No. I'm slightly... I've been thinking about it a lot, so... Why did you leave the New York Times to start Semaphore? So many reasons. I mean, I love the New York Times, and they were great to me. I was the media columnist for the New York Times. Extremely weird.

It's a great column. Extremely weird job, right? Like, you wake up every morning, punch one of your friends in the face. I mean, how long do you want to do that? And, I mean, it's very weird to cover your own world. It's enough to, you know, cause trouble among people you don't know that well. But also, you know, I had this, I had been at BuzzFeed and sort of felt that something was ending and not really been able to put my finger on it. And then, you know, been finally at the Times throwing stones at other people's glass houses, but also peering inside them.

And you could sort of see how dramatic the change is and how people are connecting to the news. And it reminded me a little, actually, of how much things were changing in the early, that early period I was writing about. And so I was writing this book and writing these columns and thinking like, oh, it does feel like another moment when what people want is so different from what they had wanted before. And there's an opportunity to do something new. So what's the big pitch for Semaphore?

It's really to answer these two questions, which I think is how I feel and how Goba in Washington, Liz Hoffman in politics, me and Max Tanney in media. And then be really, really transparent about here are the facts. Here's my take on the facts. And here's a reasonable alternative point of view on these facts. And here's how they see the same thing from China or from Africa. And to try to give people that sense of here's a smart, efficient way to get a really sophisticated point of view on this moment. Rather than, I read a story in a newspaper. I think it's probably like 80% true, but I'm then going to go Google 11 other stories on the same topic to try to figure out what's really going on and triangulate it. Which is like a terrible thing to have to do that everyone does all the

time. Yeah. I do think that curation is going to be like very important going forward just with the volume of information, especially as like Twitter seems to be, I don't even want to say it's dying. It just seems like a mess. I find that I can't like, if I want to know what's going on, I used to just go to Twitter and I'd have a list. And now there's fewer people tweeting and it's always about Elon or it's about something else. So now I'm going back to like, I've got to go to the New York Times and the Post and CNN and Politico and go to all the different sites. You should sign up for our flagship morning newsletter. I do.

But in general, that really, we want to take. And I mean, this is funny because everything in media, it's not that complicated a business. Nothing is truly new in media. And I mean, when I came up, you know, blogging was doing was, I'm going to read all the newspapers and pull out the part that you didn't see in the LA Times and bring it to you. And I think that is a really sophisticated, smart, global curation is a really valuable service of co-equal with original reporting that we're doing a lot of. Ben Smith, thanks for coming to Offline. The book is Traffic. It's fantastic. Everyone check it out. It's a great, great story about the last decade of digital media. So, thanks for coming by.

Thanks for having me, John. Congratulations on dropping your phone. Thanks. All right, we're back. And I'm here with Max Fisher. John, we did it. We did it. We kind of did it. The week is over. We have our flip phones here.

Yep. Useless piece of shit. Not really good for any kind of phoning. Hard to believe we as a society ran off of these things Should we remind people what we did this week? Yeah, so for all of you who didn't hear last week For the last week, Max and I traded in our iPhones for flip phones To break up with our smartphones

To break up with our smartphones Get over the addictions And finally put our money where our mouth is And how did you feel? How do you feel? So I actually did not walk into the studio. I floated in on a cloud of air. I've reached such a level.

I'm opening and closing doors with my mind. You've really adapted well to Los Angeles. Popped in from Earth Bar. Honestly, it was so much easier and so much more beneficial than I thought it was going to be. I really thought this week was going to be like day one or two. We were going to break. We're going to be cheating all over the place.

We're going to be walking around with my laptop as like a smartphone substitute, like all over Twitter and then come out of this and be like, that was impossible, but we learned some things. But like, I really loved it. Same. I was really happy. And after like, I don't know about you, but the first day was hard. Actually, what was the first like day for you?

The first day for me, well, it was weird because we went right from the recording, just I like went back into the office and worked. Back into the world. Back into the world. And so at my desk here, I still have my laptop. For the purposes of this experiment, voluntarily also gave up my iPad. I didn't really announce that, but I was like, it's stupid to be using my iPad if I'm not.

But I did keep my laptop, obviously, as you did. And so for the rest of the day here at the office it was not very noticeable except when i went up to go to the bathroom and then i walked to the walk to the bathroom back with no phone the first couple times i did that i was like whoa what's happening you really notice 45 seconds without your smartphone and immediately you start to feel it immediately can i tell you the very first thing i did walking out of the studio i was like i'm gonna go out to lunch and like take my kindle and read and live my new enlightened life i walked into the elevator and the very first thing i did totally involuntarily was reach into my pocket pull out the flip phone and check the screen

there's nothing on the screen it is a flip phone well so the first day i didn't have a flip phone because um we couldn't get the sim card out of my iphone because they don't do that anymore so we had to get me like a phone with a burner phone with a new number so for the first day i had nothing to check second day i had exactly your experience where i i went home from work early partly because i finished my work so early i had blocked out like two hours to do something that took me a half hour because i didn't have my phone oh my god that's one thing what were you so you because normally you would be checking your phone so often yeah yeah yeah and so i got home no one was there except my dog took leo for a walk uh it was about like you know 30 minute walk and during that so i was just just

me and leo wasn't listening to anything what were were you thinking about? Lots of stuff. But what I did was I checked, I pulled this fucking flip phone out of my pocket like eight times to check it. Yep, me too. There was nothing to check. The only person who has the number was Emily and I had just talked to her. So like there was nothing to check.

I was literally browsing the settings just to feel something. That's funny. So I thought that was going to be the whole week. By like day three, I like completely broke. I was not thinking about the smartphone. I turned it off. I had it stashed away. I was going outside sometimes without either phone because like you said, the flip phone is completely useless. And I even just, the effect went beyond even just the smartphone. It wasn't even just that I completely lost the urge and the impulse to check it.

I even noticed when I was on my laptop, I was not doing as much time wasting on Twitter, on Facebook. Same thing. Wasn't spending as much time on the group texts. I focused like immediately, way faster, came back to me. I blew through like three issues of the New Yorker. I watched a movie, one of my favorite movies over the weekend and like paid attention through the whole thing, which I have not been able to do for years. It took four or five days. It's wild.

Yeah. I'll go through what was enjoyable, what was somewhat difficult and like what i couldn't do again yeah so thoroughly enjoyable every social situation like to say that i didn't miss it at all is like an understatement like it was joyful not having it and there were a couple different levels of social situation so like uh the first thing happened is emily and i drove to dinnerovett was at the dinner as well and another friend of ours. And she drove and it was like a 20-minute drive to the dinner. And the whole time in the car where like both of us or one of us, depending if we're driving or taking an Uber, is on our phone. We just talked the entire time. Had a nice, lovely conversation.

Talking to your partner. Talking to my partner. The whole dinner. Lovett didn't notice I didn't have the phone until the very end of the dinner when we were outside. Would you normally be checking your phone during dinner? Not like if there was a lull in the conversation or if I went to the bathroom during dinner, I would check my phone. Yeah, for sure. But we were standing outside the restaurant and Emily and Lovett were on their phones and uh and i was just standing there i had so many so many moments of

seeing other people's addictive behavior which like i didn't need another way in my life to feel smug about other people well that i did that too so friday night emily and i watched a television show and uh the season premiere of the other two fantastic show and i noticed she's on her phone the whole time and i'm watching it and then the next day we're talking to people about this show and i'm like i don't know if i loved the first episode of the new season i was like you were on your phone the entire time yeah the entire time but everybody does that you don't realize how much you're missing checking your phone and you don't realize how i didn't even notice until i went to watch this movie and got to the one hour mark

and was kind of like, oh, I would be pausing the movie right about now to get some dopamine hits. But actually I'm having a lovely time. Same. And social situations, social situations with close friends and like Emily,

like that's not, usually I don't, I'm not checking my phone all the time during there. Some of them listening right now might laugh or roll their eyes, but most of the time. And I should say, usually when we're podcasting, you're on your phone the whole time,

right? You're not listening to a word that I'm saying. Yeah. But then there were, I had like, uh, Charlie has like a kid's soccer thing that happens at our house Saturday mornings.

And it goes for like a half hour, but then people stay there. So there was like a whole bunch of parents and kids there. It was like four hours that are at our house and i was like the most conversational and i was just enjoying it talking to everyone playing with the kids having a great time saturday night we went to some function again i didn't even bring any phone to the function and like met a bunch of new people which is also always you know me meeting new people at this stage i'm like i know but once you but once you get to that four, it's kind of over. Well, you know what it is, is like, it's not that I would not go up and talk to new people. It's between conversations when you're

at a function like that. One thing I do as a crutch is like check my phone while I'm waiting for the next conversation, which now I realize sort of breaks up your focus and ability to like go socialize. And because I couldn't do that, I was just like, I found myself in more conversations and I just felt better. Yes. I noticed that too. And I think it's also the things that take a little bit more effort. Yeah. You just have, you have 20%, 30% more focus when you were not on your phone during the day. And those things like starting a conversation with a new person that normally might feel like a little bit too much

work. It's a little too hard to get invested in. It suddenly feel a lot easier. I was noticing that over and over. And something else that I was doing is I would be like at home and start to feel that like a little pull of boredness where normally I would pull out the phone, but instead I would call someone and say like, let's go get coffee. Let's go get a drink. So I was doing just way more socializing generally. You used the phone as it was once intended. As an actual, which let me tell you freaks people really,

they like what happened. It's somebody die. I said, no, just my smartphone. I was going to say that the, the toughest times, though this got easier as the week went on was uh when i was by myself that was where the addiction was real you know i've talked to my therapist about this of course but sitting around i was just like uh what do i do what do i do i'm gonna be and like working out every day because i'm used to listening to a podcast or music while

i work out or having the TV on in the background, silent workouts. First, I was like, how's this going to go? Honestly, by today, I was like, this is great. And I learned after the week, I'm like, ah, I'm not so bad to be with just myself. My own thoughts aren't that scary. It's why I have always used cycling as like something to treat smartphone addiction because you can't use it because you're using both of your hands and it's silent and you're just kind of with yourself. Yeah, I was going to ask what the moments were where you either cheated or felt the strongest pull to cheat because maybe that tells you something about like where the addiction is coming from so um i never cheated in terms of really social media texting all that kind of stuff you beat me where i technically cheated was every morning um emily sleeps later than i do and i leave the house to walk to starbucks as everyone laughed about last

time and um so i have to turn off the alarm system in our house and I have to do that from my phone so I turned on the phone and then I like sometimes it was like raining a couple days and so I needed to postmates the Starbucks sure so I used postmates on my phone once and then like uh when Emily was out of the house and Charlie was sleeping I needed to use the Nanod app which is like the monitor so I used that that's about it oh and oh and then, you know what? Here's one. Yesterday, I interviewed for this podcast, for this episode, Ben Smith. And he just wrote this new book.

And he's done a ton of press interviews. And usually the way I prep for offline interviews, for Pod Save America stuff, is to just consume as much information as possible about the topic. And for offline, I try to listen to other interviews to make sure i don't you know repeat the same questions and i was like i really he did kara swisher i need to listen to what he said to kara swisher so in the in the car on the way here i turned my phone on and put it on spotify and listened to the first two minutes of the kara swisher interview but after those first two minutes i was like not only do i not want to cheat who cares

what he said to cara yeah figure out what my questions are and i had the same experience for positive america last thursday which is i get up at five we record at 10 and from 5 to 10 i consume every piece of information every take about what dan and i are going to talk about all the time right and mostly they're not that helpful well that's what i realized and so that thursday i woke up i sat up my laptop i prepped for two hours and then i worked out hung out with emily and charlie went to work uh sat here and i didn't read anything else i just quickly checked slack to see if i missed any breaking news and it was better because i was like i'm offering my opinions as that are my opinions and not the synthesis of everyone else's takes, which is fucking social media's problem. So many things that you think you really need it for, you learn.

I feel like we learned very quickly that you actually don't. So I cheated in a meaningful way, not counting the like when you need to use the apps to like, you know, I had to use it to like unlock my car, stuff like that, which is like, that's a tough one to learn. I cheated twice. Once I was out during the workday. Don't tell my boss. And I was like waiting for an email. We usually notice when someone's gone from this bustling office. I mean, if there's one fewer person, that's like a 50% staff reduction.

So you would tell, plus you're checking the swipes on the door, right? Yeah, of course yeah um i was like out during the day at a cafe and something that i did a few times this week was to check my email drove all the way back to the office because i like i wanted to live it but i was like i don't want to do that i just need to check if i got this email so like popped it open just to check for the email and of course and i was on there like caught myself cheating for like a minute or two but then it was like no i don't want to check for the email. And of course, when I was on there, I like caught myself cheating for like a minute or two. But then it was like, no, I don't want to do this. The second time was the one where I felt like I really learned something about my smartphone addiction.

It was a couple of days ago. So like very late in the week, late in the experiment. And you and I had like spent the day at the office walking around bragging to everyone about how we had like broken our smartphone addiction. I don't even know what a smartphone is anymore. I'm on a higher plane of enlightenment. I'm not down there in the muck with you all smartphone addicts feeling very good about myself. And I got home late that night from dinner and I started to feel like, not for any particular reason, just like a little sad, just like it's part of the human experience. You know, sometimes we like feel a little melancholy. And I will tell you, the pull for that smartphone was overwhelming. I really thought I had not felt it even a twinge for days.

And all of a sudden, the phone, which was in the next room in the bottom of a bag, switched off with the SIM card out, was like screaming to me. And sure enough, I looked down and all of a sudden in my hand, I don't even know I got there, was my phone turned on, on the wifi, on Instagram, checking notifications, checking messages, just like trying to like chase away the feelings. And I realized in that moment, I had been doing this for years, like every day or multiple times a day, which is, of to get like a 30 second 90 second reprieve when of course you're not actually resolving you're dealing with the feelings you're just pushing them to the margins like until you can get to like the next hour of your life i will say two things that that made me think of one uh i think i was a little more caffeinated

than usual uh last week why just just for an addictive personality like i need something like you said i need that for a substance yeah so there was a little bit of that yeah and two i was doing a lot more cocaine in the office oh yeah again it's just the culture here sure um and then two i think because i had so so many social engagements scheduled I didn't have that like if I was alone more and if I was sitting around and feel that boredom that little sadness when you're alone I would have done that where it was for me so Mondays are like my most stressful days because we have we have the pod uh and Monday afternoon pod save America and then for this last Monday I had the Ben Smith interview Tuesday so I took them so i monday i come home at

like five or six o'clock at night after the pod i uh spend time with emily and charlie we put charlie to bed i tell charlie stories 7 30 7 30 i go downstairs and then i have to like finish ben's book and prep the questions for the next day it's a stressful day yeah and i noticed i didn't cheat but when i got to the laptop after putting Charlie down, I was like, I found myself checking Twitter so much, everything else. And it was like part procrastination, but part like I'm so stressed out and I'm so tired from the day. I got to have something for me. But then it didn't make me feel better. No, it makes you feel.

I mean, that's the core of addiction is it makes you feel worse, which is why you go back to this. So when I realized I was doing this and like 10 minutes blinked by, I like put down the phone, turned it off and was just like, I am just going to like sit with this feeling and just try to like, yeah, had, I mean, think about in the last five years how often you've just been like, I'm just going to feel the bad feelings that I'm feeling, which is what you're supposed to do to cope with them. And it is by far the hardest part of the week. But I feel like in a weird way was the most valuable too. That's the other thing. It was a little transportive to other times of life. Partly it's because i was listening to serious xm in the car since i didn't have my phone and was like listening to like 90s on nine listening to some gin blossoms on the way into work today i mean that'll give anybody some

feelings but the feeling of not being connected and just thinking about stuff and listening to music like little things yeah it did i was like, this is what my life used to be like long ago. Or what life used to be like. Right. Right. Yeah. So our fearless producers and my wife, uh, were taking videos of us over the course filming,

I guess you call it, whatever. What? With the phone. What? Uh, over the course of the week. And,

um, that, you know, they, they caught each of us in a couple of different, uh, trying moments. Uh, I think we have one of, um who was having some trouble figuring out where to go here in his new home, Los Angeles.

Let's listen. So, Max, how are you going to get to the Four Seasons? Wow. I don't know where this is. I don't know how to get to it. And I'm going to get in my car and I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't wait. And this meeting is in 25 minutes and I think I'm just not going to be there.

I would say send a photo when you get there, but you can't. With what? I did on the way back from lunch. I like saw a tree that looked nice because I look at things now because I don't have a smartphone. And I took a shitty picture of it with my flip phone. That's great. He's connecting with nature. So there's so many parts of this experience that I'm so excited for listeners to reproduce.

But one that we really have exclusive here is Carolyn Dunphy just terrorizing us day in and day out with a smartphone. And like a little bit haranguing us for like messing up, which I did a few times. It's really hard to get around without a smartphone and it's like as much as I love this experiment like you know google maps makes like a nice product and it was really hard to live without and there's a couple little things like that that I just like are gonna be tough to go without because like if you don't have google maps and you just move to a new city and you're trying to go someplace it's really hard where do all these streets go? I don't know.

Yeah, no. I mean, there's essentials. I need Google Maps. I need Postmates. I need, like I said, our house alarm, Nanit for Charlie. Things like that I just need. Social media, Twitter, Instagram, I think they may be coming off my phone. Really?

Yeah. All the way off? So, you know, I check it on my laptop when I'm sitting at work because it's for work. It should be. Sure, sure. But I don't want it. I don't think I want it anymore. We'll see how long it lasts.

But texting is the one I'm trying to figure out because I genuinely missed texting. And when I'd come back to my computer and there was like 25 texts, first it would get me a little anxious. And second, I would have a little FOMO like, what did I miss? But then I was talking to my friend Shomik on Sunday and he was like 25 texts first it would get me a little anxious and second i would have a little fomo like what did i miss right but then i was i was talking to my uh friend show me on sunday and he was like i've sort of noticed that he goes i realized that you not texting is like is resulting in fewer text conversations with all my friends because you're because i'm so addicted that i'm always like texting everyone all the time which of course i love to hear um but uh But I do need to figure out how to get back to texting because I missed it. But that can also really interrupt your day and your workflow.

It's true. Yeah. And I don't need people just like, I don't need to be distracted by text conversations while I'm trying to do something else. So that I want to figure out. I have a thing about that too. Something I realized this week is there's a lot of relationships that I keep up digitally mostly.

And I was like, really not present for those this week. And like people were very understanding because I'm, you know, doing this thing. They listen to the show, but I like, you know, I don't want to like lose those relationships as I'm cutting out all the things that are horrible for me. That nodded me a little bit. So speaking of important relationships, I understand that your son had some thoughts about the offline challenge this week. What I hadn't realized is that at this age, Charlie really absorbs everything. And so I was

at work and Emily and Charlie were taking a video because they were going to cook something. And out of the blue, Charlie just said, The time to cook dad's phone. Where is dad's phone? Does it get shut down? Yeah. Why? Because he uses it too much. He's just doing an experiment about if he can go a whole Where is dad's phone? Yeah. Because he uses it too much.

He's just doing an experiment about if he can go a whole week without his phone. Do you think he can do it? You do? Devastating no from Char. A kid knows you. A kid knows you. So that was like day one, right? Yeah, the first day after. So he noticed immediately. Noticed was like day one, right? Yeah, day two.

Yeah, the first day after. So he noticed immediately. Noticed that I didn't have my phone. I bet that you felt something there. That hurt. Because he sees me on my phone all the time. Because he had gotten to the point, I think like the week before this, where he was starting to like take my phone as like a joke because he knows, you know, and he thought I could like chase him and stuff like that.

That's his brother. Yeah, right. nose you know and he thought i could like chase him and stuff like that that's his brother yeah right so um yeah so he noticed but honestly it was it was much better because i i have tried to make it a practice that when i'm with charlie and i'm playing with charlie i don't look at my phone but and i'm pretty good about that but it's not perfect and it doesn't sound like it yeah you're when you're around all the time it's just it's it's like tough. But for these days, I did. And I was just like with him all the time. And it was great. What was he saying by the end of the week?

He has not said anything. Oh, I think I said today that I'm getting my phone back and it didn't really register. Because you know what he said every morning now? He's like, I want to watch YouTube videos on your laptop. Wow. Which is a real problem. But i set a timer for anywhere from three to five minutes and he sits on my lap and he watches a video and i'm checking email screen

time it's a nice yeah it's a nice little thing it's a nice little thing well i don't know if it gave you some more time with your son that seems like a pretty significant upside i'm telling you all the social aspects of this were incredibly beneficial and personal. Should we have Dunphy come back in to judge us and give us the next challenge? Let's do it. Caroline, give us back our phones. Or don't.

They're sitting right here, but we have to get through another low-budget parody. So, greetings, gentlemen. I mean, survivors. A show I have not seen since the early 2000s. Where are the tiki torches? Well, those are, they died with Charlottesville. They could not. You think we're going to bring tiki torches?

Yeah, you think we're going to bring tiki torches into this liberal company, Max? Canceled along with Jeff Probst. No, he's not canceled, is he? I don't think so. I'm thinking of Chris Harrison. We're Googling right away. I think we just did. I think he's not canceled, is he? I don't think so. I'm thinking of Chris Harrison. We're Googling right away. I think we just did. That's another reality show.

I think he's off. RIP. For all the Survivor fans out there, Jeff is not canceled, and we're going to keep this show going. Okay. A show I've not seen since a man burned his face and hands and had to be airlifted out, and then my mom said I could never watch this show anymore. That makes sense so for those of you watching the youtube i am wearing a hat that says survivor parody a dickies

uh i would say royal blue it's extremely bowling uniform and a turtle necklace is that what they wear i don't understand who wears that okay you on Survivor? I would assume so. Okay. Just wanted to ask the question. Ironically, in hindsight bias, a bandana would have worked fine. A bandana would have worked fine. And here we are. We dove in a little too far. But watch the YouTube. We love a shameless plug.

I'm here for it. What is this in relation to? Yet to be determined. Okay. Yet to be determined. Tribe Map Quest. You talk a good game. tribe map quest you talk a good game I do you talk a good game

you're like I'm forever changed but we'll see tell me about your week cheater I did not cheat I needed my phone on the record you didn't cheat right now you did not cheat

I had to well okay other than the times we talked about before I did not cheat sounds like a cheater I needed to unlock my car okay. Other than the times we talked about before, I did not cheat. Sounds like a cheater. I needed to unlock my car. I needed an app to get into my car to drive away. Tribe

Peppa Pig. Yes. It seems that... Yes. I've heard famously that you've seen every single episode. Big fan. Big fan of Peppa Pig. Tell you a lot about dino trucks. Yep. Construction videos on YouTube. Boom. Great. of Peppa Pig. Tell you a lot about dino trucks. Yep. Construction videos on YouTube.

Boom. Great. I'm an expert. Team construction videos. It seems that phone addiction runs in the family. How do you feel about giving this to your spawn? This being the disease of smartphone addiction? Yes, the disease of smartphone addiction.

I'm trying to wean him off. Yeah. Over the last week, it's like, wow, he's got to go away from these screens. I don't want him to end up like me. Unfortunately, Apple does not fall far from the tree. There's only so much you can do with psychological mimicking. Now, gentlemen, I mean tribes, the offline producers and I, Tribe Self-Controlcontrol have taken to a vote

tribe map quest yes congratulations you will receive the advantages for the next round in your face tribe peppa pig and I did it with cheating twice

how do you guys No one has counted up the minutes It's all very scientific, John We haven't turned the phones on Listen to Stop the Steal over here What happened to trust in institutions? Accosting the Dominion voting machines Yeah, it was the Dominion voting machines

That made you lose The ghost of Hugo Chavez Once again He just keeps appearing in Offline I don't know why Come to my rescue, cyber ninjas Machines that made you lose. The ghost of Hugo Chavez. Once again. He just keeps appearing in Offline. I don't know why. Come to my rescue, cyber ninjas. Try Peppa Pig.

Pack your bags. Because unfortunately, the Friends of the Pod subscription Offline channel is correct. This is a coup. Max is now the host of Offline. R.I.P. Great, I can spend more time on my phone. Yeah, exactly. R.I.P. Great, I can spend more time on my phone. Yeah, exactly. With your son.

I did announce on the subscriber discord this week that you had become so enlightened that you had floated off into the clouds and were no longer associated with the program anymore. I wasn't on the subscriber discord because, you know. You know. Don't use computers. I'm trying to spend less time online. But he will be this week, and that's why everyone should subscribe to the Friends of the Pod Subscribe Which does not count for the purposes of smartphone addiction

Little known fact And speaking of mindfulness So everyone Take one breath with me And with that Welcome back to your iPhones Oh thanks How does it feel?

It feels fine Actually it's I feel I had actually I had actually A little pang of Anxiety Cause

All the badges And I'm like I gotta check things I actually was I saw all the red dots Turn it off again And like Didn't really care

Kind of washed over me Although here You're beyond it I just want to be competitive now Okay I actually was, I saw all the red dots. Turn it off again. And like, didn't really care. Kind of washed over me. Although here, I just want to be competitive now. Okay. How many minutes every day did we do screen time? Oh yeah, that's great.

Can we just do that? So my, the average isn't going to work because we went Wednesday to Wednesday, which is tough. So we can't do, we can't get a full week. Oh yeah,

yeah, yeah. Which sucks. But that's okay. So tell us your average before the challenge started, though. Remind us. It was 3 million hours a day?

3 million. Pretty close to that. About that. Pretty close to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's see. Week. What was this?

Why don't I give you mine while you pull it up? My average was, just to remind people, was 4 hours and 38 minutes a day. After we started the challenge, the first day was 18 minutes, and I don't think I popped above that any other day this week. Some days it was five. Okay, okay. So, again,

for me... Who lost? The week before. Well, we're about to find out since apparently there was some fucking shady business going on with the judges. You know what? Don't blame the voting machine. Blame the player. I'm taking this to the court that I designed.

That rumor about the postal truck full of ballots, totally false. Totally groundless. Fucking getting Harlan Crowe involved. We're happy to settle. The week before, it was six hours and 12 minutes a day. Oh my God. Okay, so on Thursday, you said 18. I was 17. On Friday, nine minutes.

Nice. On Saturday, one minute. Oh, my God. On Sunday, 13 seconds. Wow. On Monday, five minutes. Yesterday, four minutes. Love to see it.

And today, seven minutes. Amazing. Good for you. Good for you. What are your pickups? All right, pickups. Today was one. Good. Wow. What are your pickups? All right. Pickups. Today was one. Good.

Wow. Yesterday was four. Monday was two. And this is down. Sunday was zero. That's good. Zero on Sunday. And this is down from before the challenge started, like 280.

I know. Saturday was zero also. Whoa. Friday was nine. And Thursday was 14. So mine were around like 21, 20, 15, 14. I clearly won this challenge. You clearly have not.

The tribe is still spoken, regardless if we have tiki torches or not. But now I feel like we should have gotten the torches and run you out of the studio. But the point, it downed like 90%, like immediately, 95% and stayed there. Right. Which is, I think, pretty cool. Pretty amazing. Pretty great. Yeah.

I think for the first challenge, you guys probably knocked this out of the park. And by probably, I mean, I'll give you a little bit of credit. I am pleasantly surprised. Doesn't come easily for you. No. Which I know. Dare I say, I am proud of you. Which also doesn't come easily either.

John, are you going to keep the flip phone, do you think? No, I think the flip phone is useless. You mean the F1 Sunbeam? Yeah, or whatever. This is the burner phone that emma had to get for me because the flip phone the first one wouldn't work these things are useless but i do want to change my phone i might i might delete a few apps off my phone oh some breaking news i might delete twitter and instagram no i'll believe it when i see it i'll believe it when i

see it i found it was a flip phone totally useless totally unsustainable for more than a week at a time. But I might actually keep it and like change out the SIM card every couple of months and just doing like a week. I really feel like the lasting effects of that. And I feel like honestly, I will probably need it in a couple of months. And something that is great about the flip phone because you can change out the SIM cards is I am now like bullying everyone in my life to take like a one week flip phone challenge so I can like lend the phone out to them and they can use it for a week

and it will be on their number and then they can like pass it to another friend. And so I'm becoming a little bit of a flip phone cult leader. I've been doing some bullying. That's great. You know, and speaking of bullying, I have been slacking our producers right now in real time. Unfortunately, the tribe has spoken again.

What? What? You are the winner. No. Real advantages. You are the winner. Oh, my God. Real advantages to Ryan McCombe.

This is a 2000 Supreme Court. It's a flip. Yeah. This is your hanging Chad's moment. This is your hanging. This is a Travis day.. This is your hanging Chad's moment. This is your hanging. This is a travesty. I will not be suspending my campaign. I will be taking this to the courts, to the streets, if necessary.

Please don't make us recount Florida. Please don't make us do that. Ivy, Max Fisher heads in the Discord are going to be up in arms about this, in an uproar. Come to the courtyard to see Max later today. We'll be wild. Bring your tiki torches. Tiki torches, welcome. Tiki torches, welcome.

At crooked.com. So let me walk you through this next challenge. So it's going to be in three parts. The first part is we've downloaded an app that you have to take a full breath before your most addictive application on your phone, which I am assuming for both of you is Twitter. It has to be Twitter. So you're going to take a full breath before Twitter.

The second part is you will have to do a seven-minute meditation each morning before you pick up your phone. Seven minutes? Huh. Wow. It's actually short. You know, most people, like David Lynch does 20, so I think you could do seven. All right. All right, I'm in.

I'm in. Not that you don't have to be as weird as David Lynch. I'd say I'm at about a third of a David Lynch. Yeah. I would say you're— 0.3 David Lynch units. I think you're closer than you think. That is the kindest and meanest thing anyone has ever said to me.

You're welcome. I told you I was mean. I told you're closer than you think. That is the kindest and meanest thing anyone has ever said to me. You're welcome. I told you I was mean. I told you I was mean. So the idea of the meditation, I gather, is to kind of reconfigure your relationship to your phone and make it feel a little healthier and less impulsive. Correct. It's about taking a step back, pretending that you're on an island without technology, possibly fighting for $50,000 on a reality TV show is what we're trying to possibly do a satirical parody of and make you kind of disconnect but reconnect

a different relationship with your phone. Okay. And the third, because we switched winners a little last minute. Bullshit. It's fine. I have a background last minute. Bullshit. It's fine. I have a background in improv. I can work with this. I'm not yes-anding this nonsense.

Too late. Classic stand-up over here. Of course you're a podcaster. I've never seen that before, a stand-up guy doing a podcast. And the third part is that we're going to change the wallpaper on your phone. Okay. So since you won, you will get a wallpaper of your producer, Emma, giving you a mindfulness message like, keep it up. Good job.

Okay. You will have a very scary photo of our other producer, Austin, who's basically shaming you every time you open your phone. Wow. Wow. What is he saying to me? Well, luckily for you guys, I have the photos right here. So these are the desktop we're going to hold? So it's way to stay unplugged.

So that's the reward is Emma. And put down your phone. Wow, he looks so angry. He does. Austin looks very angry. I've never seen an angry face from Austin. And he's a Midwest boy, so he really had to try to look upset. He had to dig deep for this character.

So every time we pick up our phones, John is going to see Emma being encouraging and kind, and I'm going to see Austin being mean and scolding. Correct. I love it. And just like last week, there will be a winner and loser. Hopefully we won't have to flip it like this time, but who's to say? We've got to keep you guys on our toes. We've got to keep the listeners on their toes. We've got to keep the watchers on their toes. How much cash did John pass you under the table here?

I don't know what you're talking about. I wasn't on my phone. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have a laptop. Hands free. I'm going to find the Hunter Biden laptop that's got the secrets of what actually went down here. Just check the Venmo transactions. It'll be right there for you.

Max will be speaking more at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Right after this. We'll have just black dye dripping down his chin. Yeah. We love it. So just like last week, there will be winners and losers. We will track your progress. And by that, I mean we will continue to stalk you.

And whoever wins will receive an advantage for the next challenge. And we will also, I think, have four people who want to follow along this week, which everybody will be able to do. We're going to tweet out guidelines for the meditation, the app we can use, maybe also the background desktops if people want to have that on their phones. Yeah, if they want to have it, take it. And I would really love for people to try it out this week and to let us know how it goes. And each week we're going to actually be clipping out the rules of each challenge so that anyone can

follow along as well. So check out Crooked Media on Instagram and Twitter. And send us a voice note. Send us an email at offlineatcrooked.com. There you go. Comments, questions, concerns. Exactly. We'd love to hear from you.

Tribe Peppa Pig. Tribe MapQuest. cricket.com there you go comments questions concerns exactly so i'd love to hear from you try try peppa pig yeah let us know if you think maybe the election was fraudulent here and stolen give us give us a read on that we just want to see so try peppa pig try map quest good luck and please do not burn your hands and face in the fire like that one guy in the 2000s. And then my mom won't let me work here anymore. That is sage advice. Thank you, Jeff Probst. Namaste. Terrifying as always. Thank you, Carolyn Dunphy. Thank you, Ben Smith, for joining Offline today.

Thank you, Max, for going on this journey with me last week. And looking forward to the next challenge. Bye, guys. See you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer.

Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel Thank you.