Offline with Jon Favreau - Have Our Screens Made Us Too Distracted For Democracy?

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

 Ben Rhodes—bestselling author, Pod Save the World co-host, and fellow Obama administration alum—joins Offline to explain how America is being torn apart by short-term thinking and the technology that stokes it. Ben recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on the topic, and he and Jon connect the dots between big tech, the attention economy and domestic dogmas, drawing on fifty years of foreign policy to explain how we got to a place where no one can focus on the worst of what Trump’s doing—let alone agree on a national narrative.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. 

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After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show. and tell them we sent you? I honestly think that in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring, that the autocrats were like, we can't let this happen. We got to figure out how to make this tool work for us. Because we can't just shut it down.

We can't just shut it down, right? 2011 was a hinge point. And ever since then, the business model of these companies, which is more clicks equals more ad revenue, was seen as just the opportunity. that it is by the far right or by the autocrats, that if we can just generate more content, we can both manipulate these algorithms to have our content front and center, and we can also kind of divide, demoralize small D-democrats everywhere.

I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from the one-and-only Ben Rhodes, Pod Save the World co-host, New York Times best-selling author, and my Obama speechwriting partner in crime for about six years. Ben spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the impact that the internet and social media have had on democracies and autocracies, and he always has something smart to say that's usually grounded in the experience he has talking to activists and political leaders all over the world. Somehow, he's also found the time to add the occasional New York Times column to his prodigious content output, and his latest is about yet another problem that's been made worse by phones and feeds. It's titled, How Short-Term Thinking is Destroying America. He's

He writes, Donald Trump's rise depended on the marriage of unbridled capitalism and unregulated technology, which allowed social media to systematically demolish our attention spans and experience of shared reality. Trump declares victory. The camera focuses on the next shiny object. Negative consequences can be obfuscated today, blamed on others tomorrow. We are all living in the disorienting present swept along by currents we don't control. A perfect conversation piece for this show, and Ben and I covered it all, including how we got here, how we get out of this disorienting present, and what's required of the Democratic Party to help make it happen. It's the type of conversation Ben and I have had almost every day for years now, so we figured

we'd do it in front of the mics for anyone who wants to listen. Here's Ben Rhodes. Ben, what's up? Hey. It's good to have you on. It's great to be here. It's wild that this is- long time. I was going to say, it's wild this is your first time, considering you and I talk about the themes of the show on a daily basis. And you've also written several books that delve into the impact of social media and the internet on democracy, which is a big thing we talk about here. Yes. But we finally found a great hook, which is your most recent New York Times piece on how short-term thinking is destroying America. What inspired the piece? Two things inspired the piece. I was on a vacation, a rare vacation for me. And during this vacation, the big

beautiful bill passed, and the United States bombed Iran, which I don't even really get into in the piece, but got me thinking, you know, because my brain started to churn, and the big, beautiful bill is obvious, right? Like, we are, you know, giving trillions of dollars away to people right now to kind of juice rich people in the stock market, while saddling, you know, our future generations with tremendous deficits and debt. And also, like, you know, we can talk about this, but probably putting at risk, the dollar being the world's reserve currency, all of the things. But then bombing Iran, I kind of watched the predictable news cycle reaction to this. Did we obliterate the sites or did we just damage the sites? And no consideration as to whether

this is a smart long-term move, right? Whether this incentivizes Iranians to get a nuclear weapon someday, whether every other country in the world that might think about getting nuclear weapon is like, huh, the way to not get bombed is to get a nuclear weapon. And the complete absence of that perspective, never mind the question that we had a pretty successful coup in Iran back in 1954, and lo and behold, it led to this Iranian revolution that produced this Iranian government. So I started to think about how short-term American thinking has gotten, both in terms of policy and in terms of politics and news cycle, right? And then I was thinking about the fact that I'd gone to a screening for Eddington. And my favorite movie of the year. And I know you've

covered this, talked about it, but like in Eddington is the ultimate example of Americans who are just completely living in their phones to the point that they just can't even consider that the things that they are doing are potentially destroying their future. And at this screening, the director was there, Ariasar, was there. And the data center image, right? So while these people are destroying this town, destroying their own lies because of Q&ON, because of Black Lives Matter, because of all these different conspiracy theories online, in the backdrop, there's just a data center that's getting built. And that's all that really matters.

And I went up to him after, I said, you know, that's such a powerful image to me because it's summed up this short-term, long-term thing, right? Because of social media, because of the Internet, because of Donald Trump, because of all these reasons, we can barely think past tomorrow. And yet, there are these mega forces, whether it's climate change or AI, or the kind of dissolution of the global order that are actually going to determine the long-term future. And so that was like the jumping off point to me

of like, I want to unpack this in a piece for this kind of monthly calm eye for the times. And I'm sure he told you because he told me here that it was very intentional. Like that's exactly how he was thinking. Yeah. When he chose the data center as sort of this like background thing

that like people weren't really talking about was just like, but it went through the movie. Yeah. So it is funny too. You mentioned bombing around. because like even the simplistic question of did we obliterate it, did we not? That was like a controversy for a couple days and there were a couple reports. And I'm like, I'm like, did we obliterate?

I don't even know. I feel like in this Trump term, the episodes of America are getting even shorter than they used to be, which I guess is fitting because no one watches long anything anymore. But it does feel like we're just moving on to the next thing. Like we can't hold on to anything for. more than a couple new cycles. Yeah, that's right. And that's why this is like a great offline topic, right? Because some of this is a Trump or policy critique, right? Like, we don't plan for the future anymore, right? We're not planning for AI. How are we going to regulate

that? How are we going to protect our economy and jobs against that? How are we going to protect our security against that? We kind of gave up on climate change. Like, even Democrats barely talk about it anymore. Like, we kind of gave up on these long-term issues. But what was interesting in writing the piece and connecting it to Eddington at the beginning, was realizing it's much, much bigger than a political problem. It is a societal and cultural problem, too. And our brains have literally been reprogrammed to think about the next post or the next thing I see on my phone

and that you can be completely consumed with the question of whether Iran's nuclear sites were obliterated or not for like two days. And then when the algorithm just stops feeding you anything about that and Trump stops talking about it, it's like it never happened. It just kind of gets memory hold somewhere. But guess what? In the real world, it doesn't stop. Like the Iranians are probably rebuilding covertly their nuclear facilities and they have centrifuges out there somewhere, right? And so just because we're not looking and just because social media has captured our attention so comprehensively and kind of shortened our attention spans

and capacity to, like, think about long-term issues, it doesn't mean they're not happening. And that, again, And that's the genius of Eddington that it doesn't mean the data center is not getting built and that AI is not coming for your job, you know? And if you think social media was disruptive, wait till AI, you know. And by the way, just one funny, I think I told you this, but it's worth sharing. In the screen, you know, is that you don't even have to see Eddington to think this funny. It takes this kind of bizarre, dark, violent turn in the last third of the movie where there's

like huge shootouts and kind of almost comical violence. And I don't think I'm, you know, betraying any confidence that Bill Hader is. this screening. And he was laughing in that like Bill Hater way so uproariously, which was funny because like people are getting like massacred. But it's like Barry, if anybody watched Barry. I went to the to a premiere with my brother. And the two of us were laughing through most of the movie. And a lot, some people weren't. And I think they were like taking something. Like they didn't get the joke. But it was just, it was like skewering everything about our society right now. So you and I have, I have joked and complained, I think as recently as this morning.

about the tendency of a lot of Democrats to call everything Trump does a distraction. Yes, yes. You know, and you get to something in your piece that I think is underappreciated, which is that whatever Trump's intentions may be to distract or not to distract, we are an easily distracted country.

And our phones and feeds have made that even harder to focus on anything that he does for more than a few days. And like, I don't want to blame everything on technology, but I do feel like Trump or no Trump, I don't know how any society maintains a functional democracy in this information environment. It does feel to me, like, if we don't solve that, it doesn't matter if we get rid of Trump or not. Like, we're always going to have this problem.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the point I make, right, in the piece is that Trump is the ultimate short-term guy, right? He wants the next news cycle. He wants to dominate that new cycle. It's not about distraction. It's things he's doing. It's being the center of attention. It's kind of commanding the conversation.

And Democrats are stuck in this trap where we have to respond to what Trump does, and we should. But that means that we're not kind of putting forward any kind of long-term vision. But, like, to answer your very smart point with, like, a story of my own, I remember I was at, you know, I'll admit, one of these kind of conferences where different people are brought in and meant to talk about different things. And they had a dinner. And we were talking about AI. And I said, hey, I think, and this is like a, you know, two, three years ago, I was like, I think we're underestimating how disruptive this is going to be. This is going to make it, you know, it's going to disrupt our economy. It's going to create these new security challenges with deep fakes and all these things. And this other guy chimes in. He's like, you know what? That's not true. You know, people said the same thing about the internet. And the internet didn't destroy our democracy. Like, we were able to absorb that. And everybody kind of went on as if that was true. And later in the dinner, I was like, can I just go back? to like something that guy said because actually I think the internet

did destroy our democracy. But what's interesting about it is, I think particularly the lifters of offline, can accept the fact that the internet has kind of fundamentally broken something in our democracy. It's, you know, social media algorithms have sorted us into these fractured realities, traditional media that offers context, has been

destroyed, all the rest of that. But because it didn't happen like overnight, it's like that guy. Like, we don't think of that as having happened. It took like a decade for the internet to break American democracy, but it did. And I think this is the challenge for us, and it's going to get even harder with AI, because these things don't happen on our short time attention spans, we don't notice. I mean, this is, you know, the cliche would be the frog boy. Yeah. Like, we don't notice

that the democracy has been destroyed until after it's been destroyed. And now we're like looking up and we're like, how do we get here? Like, after my last book was about the rise of authoritarianism. And I remember I sent it to our old boss, Barack Obama. And he read that. And he read, the book and it's about the basically the authoritarian playbook and Hungary and Russia and the U.S. and China. And I was like, what do you think? He's like, well, it's pretty dark, you know? And I was like, you know, it's pretty dark out there. And he goes, I want you to think about something. I want you to think about what's different now. There's always been a competition between democracy and autocracy. There's always been nationalism, the forces you talk

about as you kind of do your revision, think about what's different. And what I realize is what's different is the internet and social media. And without the internet and social media, there is no Donald Trump. There is no capacity for Vladimir Putin to just kind of completely dominate the information space in Russia the way that he does. There's no capacity for this playbook where you use the tools of the internet either for surveillance purposes or for just kind of demoralization and dehumanization purposes or trolling purposes, right? And that's the new factor that tipped the scales in the direction of authoritarian. It gave them this tool that they didn't have. I often think about the fact that more people thought Barack Obama was born outside

of the United States at the end of the Obama administration than the beginning. Well, why is that? That's not just because the Republicans are crazy. That's because they had the internet where you could mainline these conspiracy theories. And so I think we have to come to terms before we can fix democracy with the fact that it's technology that broke it. I think it's a, um, it's especially hard for us to realize this because I think there's a human tendency to not want to believe that technology or our information environment is affecting us in a way that it's like that like we like to think that propaganda works on other people that it doesn't work on us and I kind of think there was a an emphasis for a while in the first Trump era about misinformation and and the and the theory was okay a bunch of right wingers or people. who are vulnerable to this and you know there's a tendency to think oh not smart people they'd go on the internet they'd find conspiracies and then these dummies would buy the conspiracies and we just got to fix the misinformation but it's not just about i mean misinformation is a huge part of it and we don't have

shared reality anymore but it's also like it is changing our brains yeah yeah and like every one of us is vulnerable to this and we don't like to admit it we don't like to see it but our attention spans we're more distractible. We can't focus on things. And I do think it's a more invisible force for people to say, oh, yeah, this feed that I'm going every day, it's just about other people that it's screwing up. It's not about me. Yeah, I think we have a problem as human beings in that we equate technology with progress, right? So we see new innovations as inherently like a progressive force, not like a politically progressive, but like a, we're making progress as a species because we invented this new technology, whether it's the internet or the phone or AI, right? And we don't

consider the ways in which technology might actually not be progress, right? That's the first point. Like, so we miss that. I think you're dead on in the sense that I remember talking for my last book to Maria Rasa, someone, you know, I know we've talked about as potential offline I guess, but she has this whole presentation about we have not considered the manner in which our brains as a species have literally been reprogrammed in the last decade by the internet and phones, that if you are staring at a device enough, if you're consuming information in such a different way than human beings have consumed information for thousands of years, inevitably you're actually

kind of reprogramming yourself to have that shorter attention span to seek that dopamine to sort into tribes to dehumanize the people you disagree with all these different ways in which these technologies are changing us and the last thing I'd say that

makes you fully appreciate this John and I know you know I'm curious to your experience of this having kids really drives this home because my kids are 8 and 10 wonderful, smart you know, good people.

And it's scary when you see, when they're on the iPad for too long, they literally change, you know, like, they become irritable. They become irritable, they become anxious. When you take it away from them, they're kind of out of sorts for like an hour, you know? And you, it's like watching an experiment, you know,

that, and they're less able to, you know, do a puzzle or play a board game. And so all these different ways, we have all this. information, all this evidence now that this is not progress, not for individuals, not for children, and certainly not for the body politic. And yet, we've done nothing to meaningfully put guardrails around this or to think about the ways in which, hey, we can't fix our democracy, you know, HR1, right? Like, sure, I'd like to see additional voting rights protections. But for some reason, we don't think

about like regulation of social media as part of fixing democracy. We see it as kind of a tech issue, right? In fact, it's both a societal, political, economic, it's connected to everything. Well, I mean, I think some people on the left have decided to make getting the phones out of the classrooms and banning the phones. Yeah. Like, it's a right wing issue and like kids need the phones. The darkest thing is like the kids need the phones in case there's a school shooting, which is like, is the phone's going to help in that situation? Like, no. And a lot of police officers, law enforcement will say,

no, it's actually harmful to have a bunch of people calling at that time. But also, like, it's a tough one, too. My view on this with my kids is it's impossible to just get the screens away from them. Right? Like, that's just, that's not plausible. I try to watch with them. So I'm talking about what we're watching together. And it's why I've been fucking building, I don't know how many Lego sets with Charlie,

because I'm like, okay, if we're building Legos together, then he's not watching the screen and we can talk while we do that. But I also feel like I'm just sort of, I'm like treading water on this because at some point, I mean, you know, your kids are a little older. Like at some point, I'm just going to have to let go and they're going to have their screens. Yeah, you know, this is something I'm curious your take on because I was thinking about this in doing my own research, right?

But you're right. Like, it's a losing battle ultimately because guess what? Their friends have screens. So even if you had like a no-screen policy, they're going to go to their friend's house. And then they're mad because their friend is playing some video game and they want to play it and all these things. So it's more about a management issue.

But I've seen in the research that at least, and I've tried to explain to them, the value of story, right? Like as part of what the information that they're consuming and the same thing with us, it's lost story. You know, like if you are, looking at a post, if you're looking at a tweet, if you're looking at even a short YouTube clip, that's not using that muscle in your brain of digesting a story. And actually, if you were to extrapolate out from that to the broader, you know, national identity, and I mentioned this

in the Times piece I wrote, we have no shared national story anymore, you know. I remember growing up, there was a pretty clear story about America and not just about history, but about like where we were like we were we were for these values you know like we were for you know freedom and open societies and democracy and and and we had a villain it was a soviet union um and the soviet union was for communism and and autocracy and these bad things and look it was obviously like any story like you know had some truth but some you know we weren't always the good guys and the soviets weren't all bad but actually it helped impose a values construction where I had something in common with somebody from West Virginia, right?

Like, we watched Rocky Ford and we felt the same emotion. You know, like, we were participants in the same story. And the Cold War was really fundamental to that story. And I kind of have one theory of everything that when we lost that story, like we kind of turned into, like, fighting each other. The enemy to the, certainly to the right wing in this country, the enemy became the enemy within. instead of, you know, for a little minute there, it was the terrorist overseas.

But then we got bored with that because we weren't winning that as wars. And so the enemy in the war on terror almost became you and me and libs and immigrants and George Soros and all these other villains on the right. But I think technology has deprived us of any sense of a shared national story. And if you don't have a shared national story, I mean, a lot of the policies that, you know, guys like you and I like that are going away, like, like, research and higher education and USAID, these are all Cold War constructions. Civil rights was a Cold War policy. I mean, let's face it, it was not just the moral authority of that. What even Martin Luther

King understood, and the appeal he made to Kennedy was, how are we going to win the Cold War if we're hypocrites? And we're saying we're for freedom abroad and we're against it here. And I think part of the reason why it's so easy for Trump to dismantle all these things is because there's no buy-in to a long-term national story. Well, and what he's targeting, universities, science, these are all institutions that

try to discover and amplify the truth. Yeah. Right? And he doesn't want a shared truth. Right? Like, authoritarian's don't want that share truth. That's threatening to them. is brought to you by Naked Wines. You need Naked Wines.

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So I have a very specific answer to that. And it comes from my national security perspective. And this I kind of really spent the time on my last book too. But essentially, the high water mark, I think, for social media was 2008 to 2011, right? So 2008, Obama gets elected. And it's in part because of the social media 1.0, right? Facebook is essentially a connector, right? Like, our organizers can use it to, like, meet up with each other, essentially. Yeah. And then what you saw is this tremendous momentum into the Arab Spring, where social media is suddenly being used not just to organize people, but to broadcast, protest, to get the eyes of the

world on Tahrir Square in Egypt, right? To hold dictators to account. So if there's an effort to kind of quash the protests, the whole world sees it, and the world is outraged. and other citizens are outraged and the crowds grow in the streets and you start dictators starting to fall like Mubarak in Egypt

but others in the Arab world and I honestly think that in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring that the autocrats were like we can't let this happen we got to figure out how to make this tool work for us because we can't just shut it down

we can't just shut it down right and and there I think you see a very concerted effort, again, with Vladimir Putin at the vanguard in Russia and the Chinese Communist Party doing their own flavor of this in Beijing, essentially saying, we got to get our arms around this thing. And so all of a sudden, you know, the Chinese had already built what was called the great firewall where they kind of walled off the internet in China. But they're like, wait a second, maybe we want people to be on platforms because then we can monitor everything they do, right? And so the Chinese kind of pioneer this form of mass surveillance where they're like,

we're going to basically kind of make it known that we're going to see every post. And this is our tool of actually thought control because if you're thinking and self-censoring about what you might say on social media, you're beginning to change how you think, right? Because you're just certain places you don't go, right? But then what Putin starts to do is he's like, wait a second, this is the perfect tool of disinformation. And I think what Putin was the first to figure out, but right-wingers in this country and other places soon after found out is that these algorithms are manipulatable because if I flood content, I can manipulate the algorithm to thinking that content is more important. And when this really struck me was in 2014 or 15, there was a plane

that was shot down over Ukraine, right? The Russians had already kind of had their Russian-backed separatist in eastern Ukraine. They moved some, quote, military advisors in there. And a Dutch plane was flying over Ukraine. It was MH17, I remember, and it got shut down. And it was very clear that the Russians did this, or the Russian back guys, because it was right above the area where they were operating. But the Russians had so many bots creating so much information on every platform that if you searched on Google, like forget Twitter, if you searched on Google MH17, all these theories came up. The Ukrainians shot it down. It didn't actually crash. Like, it didn't matter that it would be one theory. It just had to be a flood, right?

And I realized at that point, like, shit, since the Arab Spring height, these guys have figured out how to use these platforms to surveil people, to monitor people, but also to flood them with their content, to divide people, to just create uncertainty, to create a sense of chaos. And I think that that was it. I think after 2011 was a hinge point, and ever since then, the business model of these companies, which is more clicks equals more ad revenue, was seen as just the opportunity that it is. by the far right or by the autocrats, that if we can just generate more content, we can both manipulate these algorithms to have our content front and center, and we can also kind of divide, demoralize

small D-democrats everywhere. And distract people with all the information, and they're all just like having a good time on their feeds. I mean, you're just talking about China versus Russia on this, it reminds me of like 1984 versus Brave New World, right? Yeah. That 1984 is command control, surveillance. That's how we're going to control public opinion.

and Brave New World is like, oh, well, it's just going to be people, people being distracted doing their own thing, enjoying, like, the hollowness of life. Well, I remember there was like a, I'd coffee with a journalist in D.C. like, right after the Obama years. And we were talking about the Russian interference. You know, there was Russian interference in election. And I was, you know, saying, like, I realized, shit, like, they're doing this and this is their playbook and that they're, you know, meant to demoralize people. And then I was like, you know, and I was getting all these death. threats online and they're these Russians threatening me and he said yeah and probably a bunch

of bots and I was like oh yeah uh I guess those were some bots threatening me and he's like yeah to demoralize you and I was like shit that's true that and that worked yeah you know I got I mean I got I mean you know me I put on this kind of brave face and but underneath it I'm a softie right Like, I was sad, like, about the mean things people were saying. But I realized, I haven't called me this guy, like, I've been sad probably because of non-human beings criticizing me online. Well, and like, it doesn't even have to be bots at this point now, though. Yeah.

Right? Because if some rando on Twitter, who you don't know what their name is, you know, they just have some random Twitter handle, and they've got like 10 followers, and they're going back and forth with you, and they're saying mean things, they could be a real person and not even a bot. And you're just like, now this has ruined my day, this random person? Yeah. It's like we're all susceptible to it.

Yeah. Yeah. We're all susceptible to it. And it affects us like emotionally and psychologically. And again, just to kind of connect it to where we started, like, what you're not doing is thinking. You're not thinking like, what are the best long-term policies for this country? What's the story that we can all get behind? What's not just like the tactic to win the next fight in the news cycle or the next online fight?

what's the vision that people are going to get behind right it traps you in this loop of caring about things that when you really think about it are not that important right like the outcome of the twitter fight is not that important um the news cycle is less important than climate change or ai you know the fact that trump like you know even from our perspective or ours being the left like the fact that he walked funny across the red carpet is not really as important as, you know, him validating Russia's annexation of Ukraine. Like, like, we just get so focused on these small things that we don't think about big things. I've been thinking about this a lot because, like, I almost need, like, one document

that is a story of what has happened. Yeah. Since Trump took office again. Yeah. And if you were to write that story, like, for, for history, so that people can understand what the big things were, what would you put in there and what wouldn't you? And, like, I don't know that I'd put the Epstein files in there, even though we've talked about it for, it was probably one of the longest running stories. But, like, compared to what's happening with ice raids and rounding up immigrants and the tariffs and everything else, like these things that are going to have huge effects on millions of people, you're like, oh, that actually helps you weed up, but we don't have big stories anymore. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it in 10 years or 20 years, right,

the complete failure and refusal to regulate AI in any way, shape, or form is going to have mattered. And, like, Biden was building regulations, certainly on how it moves out in the world, but also how it's used here. Those have all been lifted, right? That's why those guys were at the inauguration. That's why Sam Altman announced, like, what, $500 billion in maybe not real investment in the U.S., but whatever. we've dismantled any climate action in this country, right? No regulation, literally a finding that greenhouse gases don't pose a threat to public health, right? That's going to matter, right?

USAID, which seemed like this kind of like, wow, well, we could look up in 20 years and maybe tens of millions of people would have died. So we just value human life. That's a big story. But then, yeah, you get into like the big, beautiful bill. And even, you know, there's the Medicaid cuts and the cuts to nutrition assistance, which are going to be profound, there's also just, we may be looking up in 20 years, and the entire global trading system is geared towards China because they're a predictable trading partner and we're not. And the U.S. dollars is no longer the reserve currency, which means Americans cannot afford to borrow. I mean, America is running a credit card. That's how we pay for things. We spend more money, and I'm not just talking about the deficit, I'm talking about individual Americans' ability to afford goods at the prices that we pay that we already think are too

high are because of the dollar being the reserve currency. Like, that could go away. And suddenly it's, you know, I don't know if it's the R&B or the euro or the Swiss franc or the yen or some amalgam of them. But these are the structural things, the climate, technology, the lies of people through USAID, the way the global economy works. You're like, never mind what's happening here at home, like, whether we have a democracy at all, you know. And that's where ice raids and having a kind of SS-type ice police force here, like, those are tectonic shifts that are happening.

And yet we kind of consume them as, you know, these short-term, you know, news cycle things that we engage with, you know. More of my conversation with Ben Rhodes after this break. But first, two quick housekeeping notes. America's labor fight began long before Starbucks and Amazon and was. a lot more violent. In season two of Shadow Kingdom, Cole Survivor, host Niccolo Minone, looks back at one of the most infamous and gruesome labor crimes in American history in the band of kids who took over the country's richest union and transformed America. With exclusive home tapes, original reporting and firsthand interviews with those who lived it, this season

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Maybe to like another concern I have, which is I worry that the politics of short-termism are more attractive and they're easier than trying to get people to care about a future that they cannot yet see. And so even if you take the technology out of it, climate change, the debt and deficits, AI now, even in sort of a more short-term kind of. context. The Medicaid cuts from the big beautiful bill, you know, they cynically push them out until after the election. So it's like harder for Democrats to run on. And, you know, we've been on campaigns and we've seen polls. And every time you ask people to try to sacrifice now or think about the future, that's always a bigger loser than elect me and I'll immediately give you a tax cut

or a rebate or, I don't know, we passed the Affordable Care Act and it wasn't popular for three or four years because it took that long to get it together and implement it, you know? And so I do wonder how Democrats and just the larger opposition to Trump sort of counter people's instincts to not want to think long term, or at least to say they want to think long term, but not really vote like they want to think long term. Like it feels like a hack that Donald Trump and and his movement have really figured out. It is a hack. And I don't claim to have the answers to this. And I really struggled, you know, to suggest some answers. The answers I suggested, you know, first of all, it was easier to get people to think long-term again when you had like a long-term proposition

like the Cold War. So the era that the Republicans are currently undoing is still the Kennedy Johnson era, right? Because you had civil rights, you had Medicaid, Medicare, you had, but also the space program, you had USCID, you had the Peace Corps. These are all long-term investments that were somehow tied back to again to the Cold War. It helped that you had a very charismatic young leader who presented it. And this, I do think, applies today. Kennedy sold it and Johnson passed a lot of it, right? But in selling it, one thing Kennedy did do is he brought everybody.

It wasn't not just government. It was like a mission that the whole society needed to participate in. You know, we need universities at the table. We need business and labor to figure out, you know, know, how to do this in the economy. We need the best researchers and scientists from around the world to come do this with us. Like, we need culture, right? We need, man, that's why there's a Kennedy Center, right?

But, like, I do think Democrats have kind of narrowly become a party of Washington. And they're not kind of wrapping their arms around allies who have interests, you know, universities, businesses, they actually do think somewhat longer term, right? And so by enlisting allies who are not just, you know, and this is what, like, I criticize Biden where, like, even the things I like that he passed, it was like the parts were like more than the sum. Yeah. There was no vision communicated. There was no sense of nationals or societal mission. Even when they tried in the context of a campaign to sell it, they called it Bidenomics.

Right. Like, you know, like, talk about an exclusionary story. like, so let's put the side that kind of vanity involved in that. Anyway, so I do think you need to kind of make it feel like it's not just a Washington game. And Trump does this too, by the way. Like, you know, he's got different people at the White House every day. Like, I think we need to get back to like, you know, big national goals that we're enlisting, you know, other people in and not just they were passing bills in Washington, right? But I also think, I mean, you just said it. Like, I think we need charismatic leaders. Yeah. And I realize that, you know, we are not in an information environment anymore where, like, a charismatic leader giving a big speech is even going to get through to a lot of people. But, and I know there's always this debate about, you know, is it the movement or is it the leader? Like, what's more important? And, you know, there's a lot of no one's coming to save us and we all got to do it ourselves and we got work together. And I totally believe that. But I do think that technology and the information environment have made. actually having a charismatic leader who can break through so much more important than it ever has been. Yeah, and first of all, I think that's right.

I think the leader has to be younger, too, because you can't be future-oriented with, like, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer. And no, this is not me even rehashing that. They could be different people with different names, but I just think you need younger people. I highlighted Zora Mamdani in my piece. And again, I'm not trying to wade into some left, center-left fight. What I am saying is, like, let's just kind of look at what this

guy's done that's interesting, right? He's broken through, right? He's young. He's different. He's doing politics in a different way. I think there's something also that's important for Democrats to think about, which is particularly when we're trying to come up with ideas. You and I talk about this all the time. We skip ahead to debating, like, the final points of the bill we would pass through Congress. Yeah. You know, like... Like 10 debates on the finer points of Medicare for all? Yeah, Medicare for All or housing policy. And not just like, what are the goals? Like, what are we trying to do here? So what a charismatic leader can do is articulate what the big goal is? Like, what is, you know, what is the priority? Like, what do we want people to think about when they think about our party, you know? But then I think the other thing about Mamdani that's interesting is I think cities, you know, are increasingly going to be these laboratories for trying out policies that you scale, you know? And, and policies for how you deploy artificial intelligence, policies for how you have low-cost clean energy solutions, right?

Policies for around affordability, right? So I'm not saying every idea he's proposed is right, but the point is, like, if you see something that can work, you know, the Democrats should be getting ideas from outside of Washington. And like, hey, here's a story that we can tell about how this policy worked in this place and we want to scale it up, you know? Yeah. Because we try to kind of develop our policies and like think tanks and, you know, in Congress. And I think that that's the wrong place for them to originate, you know.

So I think you need younger charismatic leaders. You need kind of this kind of whole society view of how to work for the future. And you need to kind of find solutions outside of Washington and try to like build out. Like California State Legislature, right? There's a lot of interesting fucking things. You know, our Buffy Wicks is done, you know, on tech regulation, on energy, on housing. Like, make, you know, Sacramento being a lab, that's a cool idea that, you know, you can then try to grow those ideas. You mentioned that Mamdani, like, went out into the communities, you know.

It's interesting because it's almost a, it's a fusion of sort of old school organizing and meeting. people and talking to people and campaigning with technology, the technology we have, not the platforms we wish we had, but what we have. And so it's like, he's going out there, he's talking to people, but then he's broadcasting that to everyone from his channels. And I do think that this is a problem with a lot of the older politicians, but it's not just their age. It's, they grew up in politics at a time where you could be separate from the people that you're trying to get the votes from and you could be behind the podium and you could be looking like you're you know you're wearing your suit you're all official and stuff like that and you run television commercials right and i think

that you know one thing even i think trump did well in the first term is like trump being on twitter all the time it's like oh he's communicating constantly and now there's obviously bad parts of that not just for the content of the tweets but i think there is an expectation now by voters that if you're going to lead us you have to be talking to us all the time about everything Yeah. I think that hurt Joe Biden, right? I think it's hurt a lot of other Democrats, too, who are great leaders, have great ideas. But if you're not out there talking about them in a way that is, you know, authentic and can connect with people, then, like, that's it.

No one's going to listen to you. It's game over, yeah. Yeah, I think what, look, two things. I mean, the first is Victor Orban, you know, the autocratic right-wing, CPAC darling, leader of Hungary, he was. going to host the trilat. Yeah. Oh, shit, yeah. That's a real home game for Zelenskyy, right?

He was a prime Mr. Hungary once before, right? Pretty conventional center-right guy. And then he was voted out in 2002. And he was in the wilderness for eight years. And he did these things called civic circles, where he built a new identity for his party by going out, not just him, but organizers, and having these meetings in communities about identity. Like, what is Hungarian identity?

What do you care about? What do you want this party to stand for? And he did it in church. he did it in communities, very grassroots bottom-up stuff. So that by the time he ran this populist campaign as a more populist right-wing autocrat type guy in 2010, there was this bottom-up buy-in that he'd been out in the communities kind of listening. And like I was saying, like developing a laboratory for his ideas. I think Democrats have to do something similar where they're just getting out in communities,

listening to people communicating not from Washington, but out in the country. But to your point, to give a specific example, again on Mamdani, did you see the video of him when he was still a nobody at the halal cart? Yeah. So Zoroamam Dani is at the halal cart and he's trying to explain to New Yorkers why, like, chicken and rice costs over $10 or something. And it never should. Now, there are two things that are interesting about that. One is I'm a new yorker by birth. I'm there a lot.

I'm struck by the fact that it's like $15 for like chicken and rice. of the cart and yeah any new yorker has been like why the fuck is it so expensive right but secondly like he just explained it like this right like in a very snappy way about where all these costs were coming from and he had the the visual of being at the hall cart with some guy who runs the cart and i was like and this again no offense because i did these conference calls when i was in the white house as expert but like that was a hundred times like more impactful than like our friend Brian Deas as National Economic Council Director doing like a press call to explain why supply chain is a driven up costs. And that's a great example because it's also not really

an ideological example and that, you know, he's a democratic socialist, but it turns out that's it's an abundance type reason. Yeah. You know, right? And one of the things he's like he wants to make it easier to get permits and for the, if you're running the halal card and that's crazy. And so it's like it doesn't even have to be an ideologically, you know, left or or left or whatever policy, if you can just explain it like a normal fucking human being. Yeah, so there he is.

He looks like a normal guy. He's with a cart vendor who's a normal guy. He's using the new technologies, right? This is going to be on TikTok. It's going to be on Instagram. And he's explaining things to people in ways they can understand.

And he's talking about things that anybody can understand. Like, why the fuck is the chicken and rice so expensive? And there's policy solutions that flow from it, right? And that's getting in the communities, finding the solutions in the communities,

right? So his solutions are informed by, and this is something Democrats don't do a good job, you have to show that your solutions are informed by the conversations that you have. You did this very well with our old boss in 2008, and I learned a lot about speech writing from you, much better to use a story that Obama learned on the campaign trail. From, when he's running for president, it was like, I met this person and she had these healthcare problems and her costs were like this, and I'm going to fix it like that. That's so much better than just saying, like, we must fix health care and here's my five-point

plan. And then even when in the White House to remember, we use the letters that we got because he didn't get out there that much. But it was like, I got this letter the other day from this woman and she has these pre-existing conditions and therefore, you know, but like if you root it as Mamdani did or Obama in like a real-world example that people can understand and then the solutions flow from that. And by the way, they become long-term solutions, right? Because, you know, the solution to lowering the costs are usually fixing some structural things that will open up a long-term space, you know? But you just got to center people in this because I think the whole, you know, interminable

debate about, like, should we be talking about democracy or not democracy? And people don't really care about democracy. It's because the way, the language we use about it, people can't see themselves in it. They can't see how it affects their lives. And so, and I believe that having a functioning democracy, like, is very important. to people's lives, but that means it's on us to describe why that's true. But it's also just like, it might even be simpler than that, John, in the sense that one thing Trump's done that we should copy is in our party, there's democracy issues, there's domestic policy issues, there's foreign policy issues, and they're all, like, siloed out, right? So we're either going to have a message on health care today, and then we're going to have a message on, like, voting rights, and then maybe we'll allow the foreign policy nerds to...

Trump, it's all the same, it's all about identity and there's no kind of real difference between these deals he's doing over here or there. Like we had to blow up these silos because all these things are connected, right? Like we were saying earlier, like technology is connected to democracy and look, our ability to solve problems is connected to democracy. So I think we have to just break down these walls between these different issues and just see them as, what's your vision? What are you trying to do? You know? Because like, yeah, like if you're trying to actually fix health care or energy in this country, you're going to have to get money the fuck out of politics, you know? And so repealing, you know, Citizens United is not about, like,

good government. It's about, like, standing up to oral companies and special interests and all the things that were in the 2007 Obama's speech, you know, like, that works politically, right? And, you know, Chris Murphy does this and Rokana does this, but like, so there are people doing this in Democratic Party where it's like, let's just stop separating out these issues from each other. Offline is brought you by ZBiotics pre-alcohol. We love Z-biotics. Huge fans. I have a Z-biotic story.

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that were all created equal, but being American should be about who your ancestors are and how long they've been here. And, you know, I asked Pete Buttigieg about this on Potsave America because I genuinely think that Democrats finding an answer to that argument, which is not just a J.D. Vance argument, but an argument of the new right, of the new nationalist right in this country, is going to lead us towards that sort of coherent vision for the future that you've talked about. Have you thought about, like, what that larger American story might be updated for, like, where we are in 2025?

I mean, I don't claim to have the answer to this. You know, but I'd offer, again, a couple of thoughts, suggestions. The first is, like, we have to remind ourselves that as dominant as Trump is, this guy is not permanent. He's 79 years old. By the way, even if the absolute worst case scenario has happened, it's still not permanent, right? Like, like, there will be another side to this thing, whether it's in three years or even if literally the horrible things happen, there's still another side to it. So you've got to be thinking about these things, right? to the J.D. Vance point, I think that, look, there's a meta answer, and then there's more of a political answer.

The meta answer is there's always been two stories, fundamentally, in America. They go back to the founding. And you and I have talked about this a bit. But like, J.D. Vance's story is actually not a new one, right? This is a country for certain people. And they're white people. It's a white Christian nation. And other people can participate. But they kind of have to accept that. that that's kind of the basis to how this works, you know? The treatment of Native Americans, of Catholics, of early immigrants. It's all there. It's all there. We've acted out that story

for most of our history, right? Then there's Barack Obama's story is the progressive story that runs all the way back to the founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin's view that the answer to what was wrong in the Constitution was the Constitution,

the more perfect union answer, that the Trump version of American exceptionalism is we aren't exceptional. We just are inherently exceptional. What we do is right. To J.D. Vance's point, I'm sure he could construct a narrative where we are the inheritors of Western supremacy. I'm not even saying white supremacy.

You could say that if you want, but more like Rome to Britain to us. You know, like we are the inheritors of these traditions and of Christianity. And if we do it, it's right. And we are exceptional. And I truly think they believe that. The Obama story, which is the story of the Kennedy family and the kings. and FDR and the progressive movement and Frederick Douglass in Reconstruction and Lincoln and back to, I think, Benjamin Franklin is, the exceptionalism is the pursuit of the more

perfect union and the pursuit of a multiracial composite nation, right? Where essentially we are enriched and stronger because basically we are the place that welcomes all strivers. And now, that's not a political message. I would argue whatever the answer is, this future point has to come into it. Um, because, their message is inherently about the past. It's about going back to something, make America great again. There was this time in the past that was better.

You had a better status or you had a more secure job or some of its race, but some of it is economics, right? Or some of it's societal. But people kind of sense that. These guys want to roll the tape back. They don't have answers about the future, right?

Democrats are better when we're the ones saying this is a nation about the future. This is a nation that's going to win the future to use one of our many campaign slogans, right? But to make it more tangible, I think what everybody feels left to right is that there are these forces

kind of crushing our lives. And they're big, out of our control forces. You know, tech companies and oral companies, and if you're Trump, you know, the deep state, there's just this top-down pressure and suddenly the future looks scarier than the past. And that's why Trump's winning the argument. The past looks safer than the future looks.

And I think you need a... an infusion, I wouldn't even say Obama because we're so partisan, but this is what John of Kennedy came along and said, there's a new frontier. Like, we are going to go there. And I think, though, this one needs a little populism today. We were going to smash that power structure. We're not going around it. We're going through it. We're going to smash the grip that these people have in our lives. And Bernie's term would be oligarchs, but it's more just like, you know, the Brexit slogan was great, take back control. But that was a reactionary one. I actually think there's a take-back control of the future. Like we are going to smash the forces that

are suffocating us, and we are going to find the answers to why technology is going to work for us, and we're not going to work for it, you know, for why we can have a clean energy transition that lowers cost for people instead of being trapped in these higher energy costs in a fossil fuel economy, you know, that is kind of have a safety net that's not just about protecting these old programs, but we need a new safety net that works for the way in which people live and work in the 21st century, right? So I think the message has to be about both, like, breaking through these forces that are, like, crushing us, but reclaiming the idea that there's a new frontier, you know? Well, and it's also how are we going to do those things?

How are we going to get to that future? Yeah. We're not going to get there if we are isolated from the world. If we are isolated from each other, if we are at war with each other all the time, if we are divided all the time, like, if we're just going to bitch and moan and yell at each other and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, don't. on each other and how about these fights and that's not going to be progress we're not going to get there and by the way like for you know again because you have to like appeal to people's self-interest like you might think that uh you are you know rich enough or well off enough or well-educated enough to uh escape the consequences of the short-term thinking of the politics the trust but like

it's going to come for us all it's going to come for us all and if it's not and it's going to come for our children. Yeah. And so if we don't find a way to live together in a country that was founded on the proposition that we are all created equal and not on the proposition that you get a leg up in this society if your ancestors were here and fought in the fucking civil war on the wrong side, then like we have to get our shit together. And we have to be a pluralistic society because when we have worked together in this country, that is when America has been at its best. Yeah, I completely agree with that.

And you need to be able to live with some discomfort to get there, right? Yeah. Like, because it doesn't just mean accommodating views you disagree with, but it means, like, standing for something in ways that can motivate people beyond those who already agree with you. And, like, look, it's not a coincidence. If you look at the last 50 years, let's not count LBJ because I'm not sure he would have gotten elected without a tragedy.

And then you got Biden, which is, kind of that 2020 election is a weird one. I'm not sure he wins without COVID. You know, Kennedy Carter, Clinton Obama, these are young outsiders. You know, you need that young outsider coming in and making that case for the future and making that case for we are going to care about things and stand for certain values, but not in an exclusionary way. Right. And they were all anti-system. Yeah. In a way, they had elements. of that reform like let's you know not as much as like smash the oligarchy but but they are elements they weren't scoldy to their opponents they didn't say before you can come on my team i need you to

admit that you're racist or you're this it'd say like this country's so great it's changed before and it can change again yeah and and that that simple idea but frankly we haven't tried it since 2008 in this party you know well if we can uh if we can get off our phones and our feeds maybe we can do some long-term thinking about that. This was fun, man. Yeah, it's great. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for me.

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