Offline with Jon Favreau - How Screens Have Warped Morality

Episode Date: May 2, 2026

Megan Garber, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book Screen People, joins Offline to explain how we’re no longer just an audience for the media we consume; we’re also actors and producers in an endless show of our own creation. She and Jon discuss the corrosive nature of an internet filled with “main characters,” whether it’s possible to overcome screen person syndrome, and why our survival as a country depends on it.

Once you lose your hope, once you become sort of cynical and allow yourselves to see the world in the way that the despot, that the regime wants you to see it, you've essentially given up, right? Like, there's no way really that a democracy in a meaningful sense can happen at that point because you are just so unable to sort of have a hope for a better future and to see the best in people. And everything just becomes, you know, Lowell, nothing matters, right? And everything is just a game just to show everyone. a character or a non-player character or whatever it might be. It's despair. Like, that's what that is. And yet it's so natural for us to want to take refuge in that

because, you know, the reality of things hurts. I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, Megan Garber. Megan writes about the intersection of internet and culture over at the Atlantic. And last week, she published one of the most offline books I've read in years. It's called Screen People. In it, she illustrates how we're no longer just an audience for the media we can consume, we're also actors and producers in an endless show of our own creation and that of our friends, our colleagues, our political opponents, even of people walking down the street.

The two-way screens we carry around in our pockets make it hard to tell the difference between living and performing, between ironic and earnest, between reality and illusion. This isn't just changing the content we're addicted to, it's changing the entire ethical framework of our society. Megan makes a very strong case that the medium is no longer just the message, as Marshall McLuhan argued in 1964, nor is it just the metaphor, as Neil Postman, an offline forefather, if you will, posited a few decades later. Today, Megan says the medium is the moral, and it turns out we don't treat each other so well when we're all just extras in each other's shows. I talked with Megan about the corrosive nature of an internet filled with main characters, whether it's possible to overcome screen person syndrome,

and why no less than our survival as a country and maybe even a planet depends on it. We'll get to that conversation in a moment, but before we do, a reminder, please consider becoming a crooked media subscriber if you haven't already so that you don't miss out on any of the great content we're putting out for our friends of the pod.

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Now, here's Megan Garber. Megan, welcome back to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Your new book, Screen People, is such a perfect fit for the show that I was worried there wouldn't be new ground for us to cover, but it turns out there's plenty. You're better and for worse. And you come at this topic from such a smart angle, and I just really enjoyed the book. And I thought we could start with how you open the Atlantic piece that's adapted from the book, which is with propranolal prescription surging. for people who don't know, those are beta blockers, used off-label for stage fright.

Yes, exactly. It's so funny, I couldn't say the word, though I had been, I have fear of flying, and I was first prescribed those, thinking that like, maybe I could do that because it was lighter than Xanax, and that didn't work, so I ended up with the Xanax. But anyway, so I knew they were beta blockers. Those are something that works. Right, exactly. Why was that your way in? And what do you think it tells us that we are medicating ourselves the same way, like, concert pianists do?

Yes. I think, oh, it's such a good question. I think, you know, stage fright, like, whether you get it as sort of a psychological condition or whether maybe you've just sort of experienced it offhand. But, A, I think it's something that a lot of us have experienced over time, right? Like, just at some point in our lives, I happen to have a fairly, like, extreme version of it. So it's something I've really had to, like, work through, you know, just even to be able to

to have a conversation like this. Like it's something I've had to work toward because I do get nervous. But I think the fact that it is so relatable that we would just be medicating ourselves out of our nervousness and out of our fear of kind of, I think, other people's eyes, essentially, and other people's stare and gaze and all that kind of stuff. It struck me just as revealing, but also as just a powerful metaphor for where we are in culture right now where so much of life is a performance on something. level. And that's not entirely new. Sociologists have for a long time talked about performance as

kind of a metaphor for social interaction. We have social scripts and all that kind of stuff. But I think now performance is so much more just kind of a standard way of life. There are expectations that when we interact, it should have the polish of a performance. It should have the charisma of a performance. We should all be, for better or for worse, main characters, right? And have a main character energy and just, you know, so much of life, I think, is oriented now toward the show in a way that I think a lot of us are aware of, but we're not quite sure, like, how to deal with it or articulate it or whatever. And so propranol, I hope I said it right, was my way into that. Yeah. So the book hinges on this distinction between one-way screens and two-way screens,

one-way screens being what we had been used to, television for decades, two-way screens now, the phones. For people who've never thought about it that way, like, what changes when the screen looks back when it's a two-way screen? Oh, yes, yes. So much changes, but it is, I think it can be hard to tell what changes because screens do look like television, right? Like my computer screen that I'm looking at right now, it does look like a television. the main difference is I am on it. I am talking with you on it through it, right? Like we're having just a normal human conversation, but it is happening through the screen. And the fact of the screen, I think, changes a lot of the other facts of just how we relate to each other in big, obvious ways. I mean, the fact that we're not in the same room together, but I think in smaller ways too. And so I think

the two-way screen, the interactive screen, it can be tempting to see it like television, like sort of an extension of what television is. But I do think that that's actually not a helpful way to think about it, because what an internet screen is, what an internet-connected interactive screen is, is sort of a portal. What Marshall McLuhan, the media scholar who's a big inspiration for the book, you know, he talked about mediums as sort of like conduits, right? And so it is a direct medium between people that shapes how people interact together. And, you know, on a screen, we are people. Right? Having a conversation just like humans have for thousands of years. And yet we are images. We are flat. We are two-dimensional. We are objects. We are pieces of media. You know, there's this like sort of

implicit dehumanization that happens on screens. But it doesn't always feel that way because we are people. We are interacting. You know, it doesn't, it's become so normal and so short of a time. And yet there is a dehumanization that happens. And I think that explains a lot of what we're reckoning with on the internet right now and a lot of the tensions that we're having is we don't quite know how to be people across the distance of the screen. One thing you have noted too is that there's this the sort of leveling effect where the screen sort of also kind of confuses what's real, what's fake, what's tragedy, what's comedy, what's funny, what's serious. I'm curious, like, how have you noticed this confluence in your own life?

I mean, I've noticed myself, well, first of all, I should say I watch a lot of TV. It is part of my job. It is part of my life. I would do it if I were not professionally obligated to do it. So I noticed it really with myself. Like a lot of the themes of the book are things that I just sort of noticed in my own life and didn't like. You know, just I was noticing myself kind of looking at reality characters, for example, reality stars, reality performers. And, I mean, I even just use the word character, right?

but like, you're not characters. And the difference between a person and a character is the difference between everything else, right? A character is owed nothing. A character is a fiction. A character does not matter because a character, on a very basic level, does not exist. And yet I kept finding myself thinking of these people as characters,

in part, in my own defense, because the shows sort of present them as such, you know? Like the shows present these people who are somewhat characters, somewhat performers, somewhat actors, but they are playing the role of themselves. And so when I started sort of interrogating, like, why am I using the wrong words? Why don't, why can't I find the right words to talk about these people who are on my TV, who are, you know, in this genre of reality TV that is defining so much of this moment?

And why is it so hard to talk about? Why is it so hard for me to talk about, which I am sure you have this as a writer too. Like when you are a writer and you cannot find the right words, it is maddening, right? It's such a particular genre of frustration. And I just kept feeling myself having that frustration of I don't quite know how to describe this to myself. I don't quite know how to convey that to readers. And the frustration, you know, if it had just been a me problem, that's fine.

You know, and you can find ways around it. They are performers. That's fine. You can call them that and move on with your life. But what kept striking me was that it felt like the confusion I was feeling as a culture critic was shared and was, you know, very common, actually, that like on a broader level, even if you're not a cultural critic who writes about reality TV shows, like there is still that kind of abiding and definitional confusion about what people are on reality shows, on,

you know, the crown, historical dramas, things like that, just sort of these basic questions of who are they, what are they? And since I couldn't answer, I thought maybe like that when I tried to answer the questions for myself, it might be interesting for others to. I felt like this one example is Instagram. And I remember when Instagram started and Instagram was just like the place that you put pictures for your group of friends and it was a small group of friends and you all saw each other and you saw each other's pictures and you commented on each other's pictures. Right. Like so you're so beautiful. Yes. Right. It started there. And now and TikTok is like this to an extreme. But now, if you're scrolling, it's like, what does it do to us to see? A person you know, like person that might be in your family, a person that you don't know that you've never met before, stranger, famous person that you know because they're famous,

someone playing a character on a show, a cartoon, and then like AI now. And it's like, but like you're not watching anything separately. You're just doing it all and going, going. And I've always thought to myself, I'm like, what is this doing to me? us. Like, it can't be, this can't be normal. We can't be built to process this. Yes. I, I'm, my head is actually feeling a little bit dizzy just hearing you describe that because it's so true. It's so

overwhelming. And I think, you know, in general, we are so, we are so, we, we have built up, um, we as really a species, a human species, but like we as sort of a collective society, too, have, you know, built up, um, hundreds and in some senses thousands of years worth of experience in terms of how to make distinctions between people who are famous, people who are real, people who aren't real. You know, there's a whole history of sort of people trying to distinguish, like, what is fact and what is fiction, and to try to like instrumentalize those distinctions and make it easier than for us, the regular people in the world with our regular little brains to process it all, right? And I think so much of what happens on screens and on the internet and on social media,

like you said in particular, is we lose those distinctions. And it's hard to sort of fully wrap your head around, I think, because it doesn't feel like we're losing them, right? It feels like everything sort of is under control. Like we've got the scroll. We've got the, you know, it's infinite scroll. That's how it's supposed to work. You swipe and you do the thing and, you know, you click and you like and all of that. And it just, it's already become so much a piece of our muscle memory, I think, to sort of engage with each other on this level that it doesn't feel, I think, again, as to human, is it actually kind of at-is. And so I think it's very natural, you know, you mentioned the confluence, like the celebrities and your parents and you're, you know, just everything coming

together, the puppy pictures and the tragedies. And I think, A, it's just overwhelming, you know, and it can, it just, overwhelm is never a good thing for a human brain, right? Like, we are not good at being overwhelmed. I can speak for myself, but I think I can speak for a lot of other people, too. But also, like, the distinctions between a famous person and, like, your mom or your, you know, know, your family member, that is a very crucial distinction that, like, in human history, we have put moral weight behind, right? But now we are losing a lot of those distinctions. And so, I think, coming to see celebrities like friends, you know, parasocial relationships and all these kinds of things where we're seeing the celebrities as our friends. I think we're seeing the

people that are closer to us as a little bit of celebrities in the sense that they are performing to, right? And all these things are sort of coming together in a way that it's not always bad, but often it is bad because we are, I think it harms us in our ability to actually interact as people. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Life is a lot sometimes. Regardless of what's keeping you up at night or leaving you overwhelmed, it's easy to feel like you have to figure it out all on your own. But you don't have to face these challenges alone. Having someone to listen to to to understand and to support you can make all the difference. That's where BetterHelp comes in. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals.

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as much anymore. This has been like a, I think it's probably started before the pandemic, but clearly the pandemic supercharged this. And then after the pandemic, there was like, why isn't anyone hanging out anymore? And this is a problem I think about all the time, you know, partly because I am a very social person and I love socializing with other people and hanging out. And I'm like, why isn't it? People aren't going to bars anymore.

They're not going to restaurants. They're not hanging out. And, you know, we've talked about that a lot on the show. you made a point that I hadn't thought of before, which is the setting that is on, and this is in your, I think it's in your chapter on the scene. The settings on our screens, right, are so curated for whatever we want. And every interaction is convenient, as convenient as possible, and is easy and frictionless and you can yell at someone and then walk away from it or someone can yell at you and you can walk away from it or you cannot have a difficult conversation instead of you can you can

just like watch someone do something and when you are in person and the screen isn't mediating your social interaction with someone there are awkward silences there's discomfort there's anxiety and anticipation about like is this going to be a good social interaction Are we going to have fun? Are we going to laugh? Right? Like all of the things that have happened forever when humans get together in person. And because you don't have to have that discomfort when you're sitting behind a screen, it seems like that's probably contributing to people hanging out less. Yes. I think that. Thank you. That was such a great description of things. Yes. I think that's absolutely what's happening. I think so many of the trends that, you know, start on the screen do not stay contained to it, right? Like they just have a way of sort of. of breaching out into the real world, IRL world, physical world, whatever you want to call it. I mean, even just basic, like, you know, so many sort of architectures of the physical world right now are sort of primed for Instagram, right? Like, you know, like where I live in Washington, D.C., like, you know, just there's public

art everywhere that is very clearly designed to be the backdrop for a selfie, right? Or just all these, you know, good vibes only signs and, you know, just all this kind of stuff. It is meant to be photographed. It is meant to be the backdrop for selfies. And I think that's a pretty nice metaphor for what happens generally, which is exactly like you described. I think we put the pressure of performance onto ourselves for just daily regular interactions. And, you know, I mentioned my own, like, you know, stage fright that, like, you know, I've never really felt it off a stage. It's always been when I know a lot of eyes are on me and that's when things get a little murky.

But, like, I'm aware of it in a certain way because I know what it feels. like to have that fear. And I have definitely had that either fear or anxiety, like you said, of sort of the interaction and, oh, what if I don't say it exactly as I wanted to? Or what if I misspeak? What if I make a bad joke? What if I, you know, just what if they don't laugh? And, you know, just all these sort of anxieties that I think everyone on some level probably has, you know, and are very like eternal and just sort of fundamental to human interaction and all that kind of stuff. But they feel, I think, so much more consequential and weighted now. because they can be filmed, first of all.

Like, our interaction is being filmed, right? And I will mispeak. I just did right there, and I didn't even mean to. It was just, but, like, you know, it happens, right? And I think, like, it will bother me more now that it's being recorded, right, than if it were just an in-person interaction that only you and I witness. So, like, just the fact of the screen, the fact of the stage and the audience does just fundamentally change things, you know, in small ways and in big.

But I think that because things can now, you know, we can be. we can have a picture taken of ourselves, you know, in an inopportune moment out in the world. We can be creepshotted. We can now have the pictures that are taken of us, like turned into deepfakes. You know, there's so much, I think, vulnerability that comes with existing, simply existing, simply being out in the physical world because of cameras, because of screens. And I think it's very natural that we would be aware of it and sort of have anxiety about it. But I think we also don't quite know where to put the anxiety or how to deal with it because it's all so new.

Right. Right now, it is. And it's only getting worse. I do want to spend some time on the political implications of us becoming screen people, since that is my wheelhouse and what I spend most of my days thinking about. There's a line in the book that I keep thinking about. Entertainment creates audiences. It does not, however, create publics. Maybe walk us through why you think entertainment can't build publics. Sure. I think, you know, entertainment can be. be a great thing, right? And like the subhead of the book, you know, how we entertained ourselves into a state of emergency. Like, I, you know, I do think that the core of the problem is entertainment, but it's not the fun of it, you know, like fun is great. It's not the relatability of it. Like, a lot of the things I think that are happening in politics in terms of so much being understood as entertainment, you know, politics via meme, politics, you know, just all these kinds of things. They're actually really good for democracy. They are what.

I think the founders had in mind when they were writing the First Amendment and thinking through the implications of speech and all of that. I think it can be wonderful. But I think the problem with entertainment in particular is it's such a kind of distant thing, right? Like you are entertained. You don't, you passively consume what is put on the stage for you. That's what entertainment effectively is, you know?

And you are therefore exempt from what happens on the stage when you are being entertained, right? Like you watch, even though. architecture of a theater, for example, you know, which is in some ways replicated on the screen. Like, the audience sits in these seats that do not move. And it would be really uncomfortable to even try to move. You're kind of rude if you try to move, right, in the middle of a performance. And the stage is set separately. And there is a marked division between the audience and the performers. And that is the assumption that we have brought into, I think, our relationship

with entertainment in general, right? And like with screens in general. And that, distinction is going away because, again, with the two-way screens, like, we are, we are participants at the same time that we are consumers, right? Like, it's all happening at the same time. But I think in terms of politics in particular, that leaves us in a really difficult place because the question is, well, we're watching the politics happen, right, as kind of a story, as a narrative, as maybe a source of entertainment. Often politics can be quite entertaining and ridiculous and all of that stuff. But then the question is, well, then how do we, insert ourselves in that, right? Like, it's so easy, I think, just to watch passively. And so much in our

culture and screen culture in particular encourages us, I think, to watch passively or to do, you know, I'm going to like a post and that will be my political engagement for the day. And all that kind of stuff. And I, you talk about this so wonderfully on the show. So I feel like I'm, you know, no, I'm, brain explaining. But I do think that that is sort of the upshot of like, just, you know, like, we don't quite know what it means to engage in this moment because watching can feel like engagement. It can, and, and the algorithms and the platforms and everything often define engagement as just watching, right? Like, that is how they define things. It's very natural. We would sort of take that in. But of course, I think that is not the engagement that we should have

in our minds when we're thinking about how to be good citizens and how to be good participants in a democracy. Yeah, I mean, it's the difference between political participation and political hobbyism, you know, which we talked about. And in a different way, And especially this is true, I think at the beginning of Trump's second term, there's a lot of people would be like, oh, I just had to turn it off, which is also like a very entertainment screen type thing, which is like, I was watching, I was watching this crazy story and it was wild and I thought it was going to end differently, but then it ended badly. And I'm not coming back for this season. I'm done. I'm going to go focus on something else. And it's like, no.

That's right. We can't escape. It will be there whether you turn the channel or not. We're here. We're here and it's just happening to us. Yes. But it is something I think about a lot because, you know, and we also get told by people who come up to us and they'll say, oh, well, obviously politics is awful, but at least it's a lot for you guys to talk about. At least it's like good content. You guys have a lot to do and a lot to say. And I'm like, I would say nothing and end these podcasts forever.

Yes. If it meant like we could have a normal politics where we did not have to worry about Donald Trump every day. But you can see like that people are primed to not believe that because they just the whole culture makes us think that it is a and you know it comes from the top with Trump but it's it's much deeper than that that it's a game and that it's a show and then we're all we're all actors in the show. That's right. And nothing matters therefore, right? Like the person who can make the best show, the most entertaining show, the most shocking show, they are the winners, right? And that is that that is true for entertainment. That's fair enough. And that's what we, I think, our kids. calibrated for culturally. But yeah, again, terrible way to do politics. Yeah, content is not, we would trade a lot for content. Yeah, exactly. In the chapter of the sets, you draw this beautiful line from the post-war suburb to Instagram, both as ways of keeping strangers out.

What's the political consequence of that connection? And I almost thought of like, is the suburban coalition basically like the screen coalition? Oh, oh, that's interesting. It could be. It very well could be. I mean, I love that way of putting it. I do think that, you know, again, to the question of sort of like, are we activated and are we implicated in what happens to us politically? I think that, you know, the suburbs in so many ways that are kind of shocking today to like read about how people thought about them at the times. But like they were very self-consciously exclusionary, right? They were saying like, we don't want the city with everything that that implied we want. organized. We want everything the same. We want control. This is America, right? And there was this very self-conscious effort to sort of propagandize suburbs into what it means to be American and to what America actually means, you know, white picket fences and all this kind of stuff. And it was just so fundamentally exclusionary and such a kind of, I think, impoverished view of what the country could be and the nation could be. And I do think that we definitely see that on Instagram and social media,

where everything is curated, right? Everything is, we're going to present this front. We're going to, you know, everything's going to look great from the outside. You don't know what's going on inside, but like on the outside, things are going to look totally ordered, and that's going to reassure people that everything's okay. And, you know, there's the word performative. I've been really interested in before this book, but definitely during the writing of the book. And I think, you know, the fact that performative, it used to actually be in the sociological literature,

something that implied power and community. Like, performative meant something that people created together. So they were like social scripts that, like, people could sort of write in the moment. And so if you were being performative, you were sort of working with another person, your scene partner or whatever it would be, you know, to sort of create a reality together. And you could take the accepted scripts or you could edit them and change them. And, you know, there was a lot of like freedom and power in that. And I think the fact that so often today, performative the word, is just used as a dismissal, right?

It's, oh, they're just faking. They're just putting on a performance. They're virtue signaling. They're vice signaling, whatever it might be. And that's the assumption we make. And I think actually, to bring it back to the initial question, I think that is a very suburban idea in a certain sense. And, you know, nothing against the suburbs as places. Right.

Suburbs can be great. But I do think that, you know, there is this kind of, they were built anyway on. this kind of fundamental in curiosity, right? And this ability to say, like, I am here in my bubble and I'm safe and protected. And, you know, nothing will challenge me. Nothing will surprise me. And I do think that that is sort of the promise of social media, too, in really the worst ways. Because it silos us, it disconnects us, all these kinds of things.

And we're just replicating these flaws when the Internet should be a place of community, right? And it should be the opposite of the suburbs. But here we are. Here we are. Here we are. I was reading it, I was wondering if there's a class element of this as well. Because like the screen conditions you describe, the performance anxiety, the party deficit, the ambient self-surveillance, it feels like a, if not mostly, disproportionately college-educated,

mostly online condition. And there's political implications there just because I do think there is an, a very online cohort on both sides, you know, right and left, that just they treat politics differently. It's more hobbyism. I say they, it's us. It's me. I'm part of it, right? Like, we're all online more. And then, you know, we all get surprised because then in an election when people haven't, people who haven't tuned in the whole election still vote and everyone's like surprised at how, you know, non-college educated people are voting. And everyone, you know, talks about the education divide, but I do wonder if there's also a screen divide there, too,

where a lot of people who aren't, you know, sitting in office jobs all the time aren't as sort of emmeshed in the screen culture as the rest of us and what that does to our politics. Yeah, I love that question. One of the thinkers that I cite in the book who really was was formative for me, was Walter Lippman, the early 20th century wrote in the 1920s and onward, newspaper, man, journalist, et cetera. And so his sort of, I would say his classic book, his public opinion that I write a little bit about in the book. And it's mostly known as a way to sort of think about public relations, right, to think about the impact of public relations, PR on information gathering. You know, and again, 1920s. So basically a hundred years ago,

I think Lippman was understanding one of the core problems of our moment that we still deal with. And I think a lot of the problems of, you know, just sort of PR as an idea, this basic idea that you shape the narrative before the narrative is then handed on to the people. That remains with us and that is a core problem with screens as well, right? Where there are deepfakes, where there are, you know, there's always a question of what's real and what isn't. But when it comes to the class question, Lipman also, at the end of public opinion, had this kind of a conclusion where he said, I don't think this can work. Not quite in those words. I'm putting words into his mouth now, but he was wondering, like, do we ask too much of people

in a democracy? Do we ask them, he called them omnicompetent citizens? Like, democracy as we have practiced it, as it was practiced in the 1920s and still the day, sort of assumes that every person has to know a little bit about everything, right? Like to be a good, responsible voter and member of the public, you need to know a little bit about Iran. You need to know a little bit about Pakistan. You need to, you know, like you need to know oil prices and this and that. And it's just so much. And I think even for professionals, it is so much to know and things are always changing. And then so to ask citizens to do that,

it does, I mean, I think Lippman very much had a point. And I think we are still kind of reckoning with that kind of unanswered question of sort of, you know, are, is democracy asking too much? And that's not an argument, of course, against democracy, but it is sort of an open question about how we think about what each person does and should be responsible for in a democracy. And then I think just to relate it a little bit more specifically to the question, I think, I mean, screens are like, they do sort of establish these separate hierarchies that are related to, traditional class structures, but not quite, right? And there's there are, there's the class of the, you know, terminally online or however you want to call it, you know, there's posters class, there's the lurkers

class, you know, there are all these kind of like many ecosystems within the broader social internet, right, that amount to often class systems. And often I think what happens is the people that exert power within those structures, you know, whether it's a Reddit mod or, you know, just whatever it might be. like those are the people that end up having so much sway over politics, you know, and so much, like, influence over everyone else. And that can be fine, you know, but I think also the fact remains, these are unelected people, right? They're not, like, traditionally part of the system as we conceive it. So I think it is sort of an open question, how do we reckon with all that, right? And how do we preserve what we want to of democracy while still preserving the internet?

Right. Which currently seems impossible, but... and getting harder. You talk about how, I want to talk about, we talk about voters, talking about politicians. You talk about how politicians are no longer expected to do the job. They're expected to perform the job. You know, the rock gets approached by both parties and, you know, Matthew McConaughey gets mentioned as the gubernatorial candidate in Texas. Putting my Democratic strategist hat on, I can tell you this is one thing I think about, like,

constantly. And I both, I both hate that this is the reality. also think that the ability to perform and become nationally well-known is probably one of the most important qualities in any kind of a national candidate or even a candidate in a state as big as as ours here in California, which we are currently seeing play out in the governor's race. But I also think that the line between being good at performing and doing the job of a political leader and just being good at getting attention is very fuzzy. And I wonder, like, how you think about that.

Oh, yeah. Oh, it's a great question. And it's sort of a perennial question, too, right? Like, it's so new and acute in this moment for all the reasons you just described. But I do think it is something that we, as a culture, as a civic body, have been reckoning with since the early days. I think back to, like, you know, the founders were, like, desperately fearful of charisma, of political charisma, you know, that they thought, and I think probably correctly. and with a lot of historical evidence on their side that, like, you know, charisma in the hands of the wrong person can be an incredibly dangerous thing. That's how demagogues happen. That's how dictators

happen, you know, and we are seeing, I think, a lot of the consequences of that. Now, I mean, one thing I would say, I think it is such a good question. And I wish I had a more specific answer to it because I think it actually does get to the heart of so much. But what I would say is, you know, when it comes to our own agency, right, as members of the public, as people in a democracy, like we do have say, it's not just like things happen to us, right? I think so often because of the power differentials that we have in our system, like it can be so easy to kind of feel like everything is done to us and, you know, for us and honest.

And to a large extent, that is probably true. But I think also we have ways to fight back. Like that's the whole point, too, right, of democracy and how, you know, the system should work. And so one way I think that we could sort of step up as people is just question. Like, is this the kind of charisma that we want, right? Is this the kind of like, like, you know, we can choose not to like the meme, not to like the, you know, if there's a cruel post being, you know, forwarded around, regardless of the team, regardless, right, of the, of who side it's on or whatever it might be, we can say, I'm not going to like it. I'm going to actually,

you know, say, I don't want to be part of this. Or, you know, just things are. along those lines, like little things that actually, because of the scale of the internet, can actually have a huge effect. So I do think that that is one answer, is just rethinking actually what political charisma is and, you know, kind of setting our own limits, like what will we accept, what will we not? And it's, I'm making it sound maybe like it's an easy thing. And of course, it's not an easy thing. It's very, you know, it's really getting to like fundamentals. But I think that's sort of where we are on the internet is that we actually do need to sort of come together and hopefully as a collective and as a community,

like rethink these very basic things and sort of answer basic questions for ourselves in light of the internet. And basically, you know, is this the world we want to be living in? Is this the world we want to give to our kids? And if the answer is no, we should change it. Offline is brought you by Quince.

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Hillary Clinton was the wife of a president. and then a senator. Joe Biden was Barack Obama's vice president. Obama's a good example of someone who sort of came from nowhere, just on his own charisma, right? But we are left with now, and we can talk about it here in California, right? Like, Governor Newsom was very well known before he was governor,

who was lieutenant governor, and gay marriage sort of propelled him to stardom, and Jerry Brown before him in Schwarzenegger and all these people aren't. And now we have candidates where, like, they can't get known. So then, you know, strategy will say, well, the way to get known today is you got to get attention. And Donald Trump, you know, he knows how to get attention and he's really good at get attention. So if you get attention, you get well, you can get attention if you light yourself on fire, right? Like people will pay attention to you, but like, is that the right attention?

And there is this whole like, well, all attention is good attention. Well, it depends on what your purpose is, right? Like if you just want to get attention for the sake of getting attention, sure, all attention is good attention. but if you are trying to govern a polity and especially one as big as America and like representative democracy in a responsible way, then the target becomes very small because like you must get attention and do something to get attention that does not render you a demagogue or a fool. Exactly. Yes. That's what I know. That's that's that's the target that I think like the Democratic Party has to hit next time.

And I just don't know how to do that because it is so, I think it's very. very, very tricky. It is very tricky. And also, it's such a race to the bottom, right? Because, you know, like, say someone actually did light themselves on fire to get attention. Like, then, you know, the person on the other side would say, okay, well, now we have to light ourselves on fire and do a dance. You know, like, you're building, right? And there's just, there's no, it never stops. And so I do think, though, that that is one way that the public can sort of have a role in it, right? If we just like, if we can sort of, you know, media literacy, I think is just such an important part of all of this. And I think just on a level of media literacy,

if we can sort of understand how the incentives of the intention economy work, which I think a lot of people do just implicitly, like spending time on social media, like you do get a very good sense of what the incentives are for better or for worse, right? And I think if we can sort of port that skepticism, that knowledge of the workings of things to our sense of politics, we can then be a little bit better equipped to say, wait a sec, is that politician, like, what are they saying beyond getting my attention? Are they just shocking me to get my eyeballs? Or are they shocking me to share a message? And if, you know, if so, is it a message that I want and agree with? You know, and so I think if we can just slowly and over time kind of pull things back to like the actual

issues that matter, the matters of life and death, the moral questions, the communal questions, the questions about our shared fate and future, like that will help a lot. But it does take every one of us, I think, to sort of push back and reject these very cynical ideas about what political charisma is and what political attention should involve. Yeah. One of the central arguments in your book is that the medium is the moral now, right? That this is changing our sort of moral framework in our moral environment. And, you know, it made me think about how the Trump administration has posted about

immigrants being detained and deported, ships being blown up in the Caribbean, targets being blown up in Iran, and it's all memes and trolls and video game type posts, and it's mixing real violence and suffering with pop culture and entertainment. And, like, I don't think that any of this has really helped them politically, but what do you think it's doing to the rest of us? I think it is coarsening us, really. I think it is, you know, it's, I want to be someone. who resist that kind of messaging, right? Like, I want to be someone who says, you know, I'm going to look at that image and be horrified, right? Or I'm going to read that meme and be offended on behalf of myself and all of humanity, basically. You know, but I think over time,

things get normalized so easily. And because they're in the context of politics where, you know, everything is a constant competition, right? And so you, it's not happening in a bubble. It's, you know, the Democrats then are having to say, okay, well, what is our answer to this? do we deal with this? Like there is no real exemption, right, from this. And it would be nice if there were, but there isn't. And so there has to be some reaction. And that's the challenge, because there's no way that you can just ignore things, right? Or just say, like, well, that's not how I want to be, so I'm not going to be like that and just close it. You know, that's not an option. And so I think it's really incumbent on all of us to sort of think systematically almost about that, the question that

you just asked, like, why, like, do we want this? What is this doing to us? Is this the world we want? And I do think that's the operative question. And it can be hard because it's so broad, right? And it's so like, well, what do you do with the answer, right? But I think the answer, if we do not want this, if we do not want a leader, whoever he or she might be, you know, modeling this for us as this is what America is, this is what

our culture is. This is who we are together. If we do not want that, that needs to be the operative point of everything else, right? Like that is the basic question and everything else can kind of flow from that. So I think really it does involve getting back to just these basics of just like human interaction, right? And like how do we want to be human together? And I think very often what happens right now is we are not doing a very good job of it together on the screens. Yeah, because I think and this is a very sort of political lens to look at things and people like, well, that's not going to build them more support.

And that's not going to convince anyone. But it's not that it has to convince anyone. It's the first time you see the video of them blowing up the boat, you are outraged. And the second time, you are, like, shocked that it happened again. And then by the 10th time it happens, you scroll by it on your feed. And you know it's bad, but you lost the ability to be outraged. And for so long, I think the answer is like, don't normalize this. And, like, that doesn't work to tell someone not to normalize it.

But it's like, yeah. I'm not normalizing it as we speak. Right. Yeah. Like, I find myself trying to look at this. I'll be like, no, no, no, be as angry as you were the first time you saw this because it's still happening and it's still awful. And it's not like that episode is over, you know, like, which is the, which is the whole story of the trial. And I think, you know, they know this, right? Like, if there's any intention to what they're doing, it's not to build support for their policies.

It's to say, we want to be able to do this without anyone bugging us and pushing back on it. And in order to do that, we have to make it normal for people. and we have to just keep doing it and fight through the outrage. And at some point, everyone will be tuckered out. I mean, like, Putin figured this out with Ukraine, right? Like, there was going to be an invasion and everyone was going to free about it. But, like, if I can outlast the Ukrainians and I can take this a couple of years, support's going to dwindle for this because people are going to pay attention to other shit.

And then that's that. Right, right, exactly. And it's so, it's frustrating because it's weaponizing our own kind of brains and biology against us, right? Like, our brains are so well calibrated to kind of move on to the next. thing. Like, we don't want to be in pain. We don't, whether it's our own pain or pain of others that we've witnessed, like, we don't want that. We want to shut it out and our brains are very, very, very good at doing that. So on some level, we're having to fight against really who we are, I think, to deal with this new environment. But I think, to me, that this is another core of things, right? It's just like,

cynicism. Cynicism comes up so often in, you know, literary dystopias, 1984, whatever it might be. it also comes up in scholarly works on Russia and totalitarian regimes throughout the 20th century. Hannah Arendt talked about cynicism as kind of the core problem of a populace, the core thing that will happen among a populace before it sort of gives over to a totalitarian power structure. Like once you lose your hope, once you become sort of cynical and allow yourselves to see the world in the way that the despot, that the regime wants you to see it, you've essentially given up, right? Like, there's no way really that a democracy in a meaningful sense can happen at that point because you are just so unable to sort of have a hope for a better future and to see the best in people.

And everything just becomes, you know, Lowell, nothing matters, right? And everything is just a game just to show everyone's a character or a non-player character or whatever it might be. And just, you know, it's despair. Like, that's what that is. And yet it's so natural for us to want to take refuge in that because, you know, the reality of things hurts. But I think like if we can get a little bit better about just sort of meeting the realities head on and forcing ourselves to look, forcing ourselves not to forget that these things are happening as hard as it is, like that's part of the responsibility of a democracy. And that's part of what we owe to each other, I think, especially in this really pivotal moment. Especially now.

You last question, you co-host a podcast called How to Know What's Real. You write a book about screens. You are presumably online a lot. Like, where's your own line? How do you, how do you metabolize all of this without it, without it eating you? Any tips? Oh, goodness. Oh, boy, boy, boy. I mean, I do, I will say, I do a digital Sabbath kind of idea. I do inspired actually by offline, like, like I think it's a really good idea to just have that little bit of detox, whatever that might look like for an individual person. I do try to put my phone down. I will admit, I got one of those phone jails. Have you seen these? Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, I am the owner. Not one but two, actually. I got one for myself. How's it worked? Have you used it?

It worked great. Didn't work great. It should have worked. But the thing is you always know, you, you know, there's hammers. You can, you know, there are ways you can break your phone out. So if you're a true addict, they're not going to do much good. But, you know, if you're not at that level of sadness, then they should work great. But, you know, So I do think just sort of putting your phone away, like giving your brain a chance to sort of remember what the world is, to touch grass, as they say, and to kind of be outside and to smell and hear and use your senses and all that kind of stuff, that can be a really great one. And then in terms of just the coarsening of things, in terms of the role that I think we all

can play in this ecosystem that we're building, I mean, I just try to catch myself. You know, when I think of someone as a character, for example, you know, like so many journalists in the heyday of Twitter spent a lot of time on Twitter. And so I was there for the peak days of main character energy, you know, this idea that like the main character is the person on Twitter that you do not want to be, all this kind of stuff and watching all these pylons and stuff. And I just began to realize that when I found myself sort of giving over to that way of seeing and, you know, when I thought of myself as thinking of someone else as a character

and just being like, oh, that's today's main character or, you know, referring to someone as their hashtag meme name, whatever it might be, you know? And just to sort of step back and remind myself, like, that's not who they are. That is who they are online. That is a name given. That is, you know, and just sort of to remember the humanity of it all. And like just, I mean, it's so basic, but like sort of the golden rule of it all too, like is like if this were me being piled up on, like, how would I feel? And would I want this? And is this fair? And, you know, just these very basic questions of interaction. But that is actually, I think, really important to do because it can be hard to do because it can feel so simplistic almost, right? Like not just simple, but simplistic

and not up to the challenges that we face, which are so huge and complicated and all of that kind of thing. But I do think that if we sort of set up the kind of how do we want to be together and how do we want to treat each other, how do we want to be treated, if we sort of have that as like our guiding light and our North Star and all that kind of stuff, that will make a tremendous difference. So I try to live that in my life. I don't always succeed. I don't always succeed. have not really made good work of the phone jail, but I try, I try. And I think, I think, you know, trying at least is something, right? I mean, look, the phone jail is great and the putting the phone down is great. And then I do think, and I've thought about this a lot more, not just because I feel

like I've given up and I'm weak now. But like, I was like, all right, we got to be on the phone in a better way, right? We got to interact on social media in a better way. And one thing, and your cynicism point reminded me of this, and your sort of performative point, right? Which is like, and they're connected, which is when you, you're, you know, you say that, oh, that's so performative. It's like the ultimate form of cynicism because you're saying to someone that what you're doing or saying isn't real, that you have an ulterior motive, that it's not genuine, which is, of course, very hard to disprove and then becomes like very nihilistic. And so I also, it's like, I'm not going to stop criticizing people. That's part of

what I do for a living. People are going to criticize me. But I'm like, well, how would I want to be criticized. Well, I want an idea to be criticized that I said. If I have an opinion, I would love that to be criticized. If I said something that upset someone, criticize that. But when someone does something, you're like, well, they just did that because they're trying to get attention, or they want to make money, or they think that this is good for their brand, or this is good business for them, or they just want the clicks. And I have been guilty of this, of saying this for years, But I really lately have been trying to avoid doing that. It's like, can you criticize someone for their idea or their statement without trying to guess their motivation?

Because we don't know what people. We can be pretty sure what someone's motivation is, but we cannot be sure what their motivation is. And we don't want people guessing our motivations, right? Or misunderstanding them. So that's one way that I've been thinking of. We'll see if it last. That's amazing. No, I really do love that.

And I also love just the question of why, right? Like, it's so easy to make assumptions online. And it's so easy to think that, oh, I know why they did that. But often we don't, right? We don't know. We don't know most of these people. We don't know. We don't know.

We don't know. Yeah, exactly. Like, their motivation could be like, I'm a bot, you know, made by Moldova or whatever it might be. Like, we just don't know. But I do think, like, the fact that, like, it's so hard to ask on screens, but also it barely even occurs to us anymore to ask. Like, why are you doing?

You know, so, like, I think just. We can sort of get back to, you know, it doesn't have to be an aggressive, like, why are you behaving this way? But, you know, I think sometimes, like, a little curiosity can go a long way, too. So that's, I love that. I'm going to start doing that for myself, too. Thank you. Well, thank you.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me. It was always great to chat with you. And the book is Screen People. Everyone should go read it. It's fantastic. Thank you for writing it. And come back again soon. Oh, please.

I'd love to. Thank you so much. Bye, Megan. Take care. Bye. Good to see you. Thanks. Offline is a Crooked Media production.

It's written and hosted by me, John Favre. It's produced by Emma Ilich Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer, and Anisha Banerjee is our associate producer. Audio support from Charlotte Landis. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Matt DeGroate is our VP of production. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music.

Thanks to De Lawn Villanueva, Eric Chute and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.