Offline with Jon Favreau - Lessons from the Depths of the Internet

Episode Date: September 11, 2022

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.

I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the best of Offline. First, a quick update. Offline is taking a break for the next few weeks. The team and I have some long planned time away as we unplug, recharge, and I'm sorry for doing this, go offline. Don't worry, we'll be back. New episodes of Offline will hit your feed in early October. But before we go, I wanted to look back and see what lessons we've learned from plumbing the depths of the internet.

So today, instead of our usual interview, we picked out our all-time favorite moments from Offline so far. When I started the show, I had a good sense that the internet was breaking us. Our brains, our culture, especially our politics. But it was only a sense. I didn't fully realize the extent of the damage, and I definitely didn't understand the forces driving it. Now, 10 months and 40 conversations later, I have a much better handle on it. I will say that I'm pretty worried, much more so than when we started. And I'm not sure we can regulate ourselves out of this mess either. But I am hopeful that individually, we can each change our relationship with the internet in ways that will help us live healthier and happier lives.

I haven't unplugged or quit Twitter, but I'm definitely doom-scrolling less. I'm not getting into Twitter fights, putting the phone down more, trying to spend more time being present with people, especially when I'm hanging out with Charlie. And I hope these conversations have helped you too. So today we're going to look back at some of the highlights, the conversations that have helped us make sense of it all and

helped us reassess our screen time with people like Stephen Colbert, Roxane Gay, Jenny O'Dell, Hank Green, and so many more. Here's your Offline Rewind. your offline rewind. Okay, so the first moment I want to share is from my conversation with Stephen Colbert in November of last year. At that time, I was just beginning to understand what this show could be. I was thinking about my own relationship with my phone, especially Twitter, and wanted to hear about our guests' relationships with their phones, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the reasons I did this show is because I felt like the pandemic forced our already extremely online culture to spend even more time online. And I'm not sure that's been a good thing.

What do you think? Have you experienced that at all? I don't think anybody could honestly say, if you own a smartphone, you can't say that you're not on the internet too much. I went and got my booster on Friday. And I sat down. And as I sat down, I reached into this code pocket here and pulled out my phone and flipped it open to look at it. And I went, oh, why did i really need to do that i have 15 minutes here because you have to wait 15 minutes before you leave right 15 minutes here

i could just spend 15 minutes just people watching and so i i did and i people watched and every single person was on their phone look at their phone and so i went ah fucking i'll do the same thing and, because that wasn't that interesting to watch because they were just doing this. They were just doing the scroll. I have the little thing. I don't know, maybe everybody has this, but I have the how long, how much. Yes. How much you spend on your phone. Comes on Sunday. Comes on Sunday. That's an app I've installed or whether it's something, some toggle I flipped over in my iPhone. I'm not sure where that information comes from,

but I do find it distressing that it's, it's like eight hours a day. You're eight. Oh, wow. Oh, I thought I was, I was like over,

I was like hitting five and I was worried about myself. We're constantly searching for what is the conversation today? And I know you have very much the same thing. But because we have to do a new one of these every day, I am constantly trying to peel the onion and say, well, what's really behind that? What's behind that? What's behind that? What's behind that? Just give some context for the conversation.

So even as someone's pitching me their jokes on the story, I'm listening with one ear and the other ear, I'm reading about the story to see whether there's any sort of juxtapositional information here that could be comedic or does it relate to some other thing that we're talking about today? And so, but for what I do, which is really, it's not necessarily much media criticism is that I'm a curator of the daily media experience.

Yeah. He's like, well, we watched it too, or I read it too, or I saw that meme too, or I had that reaction to this event as well. And here's how we processed it. Because you had your emotional process, you the audience. This is our emotional process but to have such a wide net cast all the time it is i i kind of we have to lower ourselves into the radioactive pool that is the internet just to know yeah i know that we're going to be pulled out like a carbon rod at the end of the day and they put the carbon rod in front of a TV and I irradiated back at the audience at a

much lower rad level that's not lethal. Do you know what I mean? But we feel poisoned. Part of the job is that I'm drinking the radioactive, you know, I'm doing shots of the radioactive pool in order to radiate it back at you. So that's part of the job that I don't particularly dig, Daddy-O. Is it all Twitter that you're doing are you scrolling through twitter or no i i don't ever do that anymore oh that's good i don't even have twitter anymore oh wow i still tweet i still tweet but i literally give a tweet to somebody else to tweet and that's one of that's the only the only way i've been able to reduce my intake at all is that i i never read twitter well i was going to say that.

I'm going to read the people I follow, but you're lying to yourself. You're going to start looking at your mentions. You're going to look at the comments. You're going to look at people saying about the show. You don't want to do that. I don't do that. I haven't looked at my mentions forever. I don't do that. This is already a much healthier social media

diet or news phone diet. I don't Google myself. I haven't done that since... i have not searched for my own articles since the porcelain dinner in 2006 because you figured that was enough jesus wept that exactly i have enough attention for anybody uh yeah i think it's uh ultimately here's the thing does it break break our brain? My brain came pre-broken. I always have six thoughts going at once in my mind. That sort of balkanized way that we all think now at the same time. It's as if like how you can partition a hard drive.

My brain is always partitioned and running three or four programs at once. And the internet merely is, as my daughter once said to me, dad, there's never been anybody more ready to receive the internet than you because you are the internet. Like that's how your brain works in good ways and bad ways. And so I don't feel, I feel basically the culture of the internet is poisonous. The mechanism of the internet, I think, is wonderful. Stephen's brain seems to be tailor-made for the internet, but that isn't the case for most of us. A few months later, I sat down with New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay about her relationship with the internet and why, at the time, she had decided to step away from social media. What was your experience like on Twitter when you finally decided to step back

and spend a little less time on social media? I just hit a wall. I just didn't like the person I was becoming more than, it was more than just the constant harassment and cruelty. I was finding myself becoming pettier and pettier and just, you know, just like that need to have the last word. And I love being right. There's just, there are a few things I love more than being right. And I hate when people misinterpret me

or misstate my positions. And so I was in this constant mode of correction. And I have never been one to look up myself. I don't search my name on Twitter. I never have because I don't want to know, honestly, what you are talking about. If you're talking shit about me, that's really none of my business. I only ever see it when people tag me into it. And when that happens, I can't help but to figure out why.

Like, what's being said? And I would just go down these toxic rabbit holes of people who clearly just don't like me and were looking for excuses that would make it supposedly safe for them to air that dislike. And so I just realized this isn't who I am. This is not how I want to be in the world. This has nothing to do with my actual work. And so I'm trying. And it's a process. I'm just trying to unclench and to just, you know, so what if someone's out there misrepresenting something I've said or what I believe, I've always had hobbies and interests outside of the internet, thank God. And so I'm just spending more time doing the kinds of things that I actually want to be doing. Yeah, I made the mistake of thinking that arguments on Twitter were things that you could win or that like people could be reasoned with

or that I guess some of these arguments were on the level when someone was like criticizing you or coming after you. And I would go into the mentions and I would reply to people not to try to be an asshole back to them, but to try to say like, oh, maybe I'll convince someone why I was right. Or maybe I'll have an interesting debate or conversation. And pretty soon you realize like, that's just not possible. Like that's not what the platform is for. And that's not really what the platform facilitates. It isn't. And I also find that people tend to want to debate what I've written. And for me, the beginning and end of my engagement with a subject is the essay that I've published. I don't have more interest than that, unless I'm, of course, at an event or talking with friends and colleagues.

And people tend to get really disappointed that whatever I'm writing about isn't my lifelong passion. And it's like, I have many interests. And as a cultural critic, I'm going to write about many things. But I don't owe you engagement beyond the work. And I'm just reminding myself of that more and more that the work is engagement enough. Yeah, it is. Well, and even if someone wanted to engage with an opinion I have on the pod or anything like that, and it's an individual and we're one-on-one, I'd be happy to have that conversation. But that's not what engagement is on social media.

When you engage with one person, you are then once again going fully public with that engagement. And it's an audience of people that are going to hear that that probably don't necessarily need to hear that. Yeah. And the reality is that I just find that there's not a lot of good faith engagement. Whenever people want to supposedly engage with me, what they really want to do is share their pet perspective and tell me that I'm wrong. And that's actually not engagement. So feel free to tell me that I'm wrong, but you're not really looking for a conversation.

You're looking for affirmation of your point of view and acknowledgement. And I don't think, actually, I know it's not my job to do that for you. You have to figure that out on your own. And so, you know, the internet is a mess. It's just a mess. You know, and I think that a lot of it is because the people who created internet platforms sort of decided that they were not going to tend to the gardens that they built. Anything can go. Let's go ahead and build weeds.

Fuck civility. Of course, white supremacy on these platforms is fine. Misinformation, cool. And we're seeing the result of that. We're seeing what a lack of taste and curation becomes. And that's not even referring to some of these pettier, more aggravating day-to-day interactions, but the kind of energy that enables people to think, yes, I'm going to say this absolutely ridiculous thing to this person I disagree with, because why not? Because I can. And I think that most people don't have that kind of outlet anywhere else. Roxanne was not the last guest who talked about bad faith engagement online.

A lot of the people I talked to had reflections about the ways that decisions around engagement have brought together the wrong people, changed how we talk, or how we create. Two of my favorite moments on this thread came from YouTuber Hank Green and MSNBC host Chris Hayes. Here's Hank Green and MSNBC host Chris Hayes. Here's Hank Green. Do you look back at 2007 as like the good old days of the internet and wonder what changed? Like, what do you think? How do you think it's evolved over the years? I think that the... Of course I do. Well, do you think it's gotten worse or is that just what people are? Is that just...

Are people now paying attention to what's better? No, John, I don't think anything's gotten worse. Does it feel like things have gotten worse? That's a ludicrous idea. Where did you get that idea? You know what's funny is I have talked to Alex Stamos, who was the former chief security officer at Facebook. And he's like, look, I think Facebook has done a lot of bad shit. I take responsibility for a lot of that.

But I think a lot of what we don't like about the internet now is merely a reflection of human nature and us and not necessarily the internet itself. And I don't know about that. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me hear what you think about that. So about that specifically, this is like a weird name drop, but I was talking, it was an interview. I was interviewing Bill Gates and he said basically the same thing. And it was like, there's not like these platforms are trying to get people to do anything.

I mean, they're not trying to get people to believe one thing or another. They're not trying to get people to be like angry. And I'm like, yeah, they are trying to get people to do something, Bill. They're trying to get people to do whatever makes them the most money. And he'm like, yeah, they are trying to get people to do something, Bill. They're trying to get people to do whatever makes them the most money. And he was like, oh, yeah, aside from the profit motive. And I was like, ah.

So like in our society, it is perfectly OK for a social media platform to do whatever they can to make the most money because like that's what they're supposed to do. It would not be OK for them to say, what can we do to make people happy or sad or vote one way or another? That we would not be OK with. Like that's very, very creepy to think that like this social media platform is designed to mollify me or to enrage me or to get me to vote for Joe Biden. But it is perfectly fine for them to do whatever it takes to get me to be the best consumer, to get me to be on the platform for the longest amount of time possible. And I think that we have to accept that part of the side effect of that may very well be that it does result in me being enraged. The side effect of the profit motive, the side effect of trying to keep people on the website might be that the best way to do that

is to have people be unhappy and lonely and angry. And in the long term, that might actually be bad for the company. But if they were trying to get people to stay on the website for longer, that did seem to be the thing that was doing it. And maybe Facebook is paying some price for that now. And also, maybe we all pay some price for that in the long term, because it's an awful, awful hard to run a company in a society that's falling apart. And I am legitimately worried about that. I mean, one thing I've wondered about is, can you have a profitable media company or platform

that engages people by, you know, connecting them with content like you do that makes them feel informed, inspired? Maybe they laugh, right? Like there's other ways to engage people, right? Like, is this about tweaking the algorithms or is it just like, once you have these platforms that are seeking profit, all hope is lost? Right. I mean, so I have to have some hope. And so I think a fair amount about how to have hope in the face of all of this. I think it's even deeper than that.

I think that it may not be about the companies, it may not be about the platforms, it may be about human communication, which is the thing that we are best at. It's the thing that makes us special. It's what made any of this possible. The house that I'm living in, the headphones I'm wearing, the drugs I take, I have a chronic illness. Also the recreational drugs. All of the drugs. All of the drugs. It's the thing that makes all this stuff possible. So revolutions to communications technologies, like communications technology revolutions, are always really disruptive. The biggest one we have

ever had was the printing press. And Martin Luther was able to take down the Catholic Church by himself. Take on. I shouldn't say take down. Obviously, they're still around. Still around. Still kicking. And the parallels are like really remarkable if you start to look at them.

Like one of my favorite bits of this is that the Catholic Church kept trying to respond to Martin Luther, but they would only do it in Latin because that was the language of the church. Like you couldn't do it in the native languages that people actually spoke. And so Martin Luther, he was translating these documents into all the different languages and the church would respond only in Latin, which no one spoke. And that feels a little bit similar to some podcasters being like, I'm just want to think and talk and be loud and like ask questions and be curious and talk to different people. And the government being like, we have to speak in a way that no one can misunderstand and that will make no one angry. And so we can say nothing and we're paralyzed and we get everything wrong. And then people get mad at us for getting everything wrong. And then we're like, you need to be more authoritative. And so they try that and it's

like, well, it turns out you were wrong, like a little bit wrong about one thing. So you need to be more vague. And so they try that and it's like, you can have existed for a long, long time are losing that power. And you see it in the disregarding of expertise and the denigrating of elites. And it feels very reminiscent of a kind of Reformation vibe, which did not turn out well short term. And here's an excerpt from my conversation with Chris Hayes. We've talked a lot on this show about all the ways the Internet is breaking our brains. You seem to be saying that it's like breaking our souls, which is even more depressing. Yeah, no, my focus is much less on the on it. I almost say nothing about our cognitive i mean

i said at the beginning a little about the informational processing but i think it's doing much something much more profound about who we are as people and how we interact and how we think about other fellow humans and yeah i think it i think it is doing something pretty profound there now again it can do the opposite i mean i i have to say i have become partly i tell i tell myself that this is for work which it is i'm writing this book about attention i've become a big tiktok enjoyer now i love tiktok to me is like it i'm sure there's lots of corners over there terrible the the corner of tiktok i have is pretty delightful it's a lot of people making sandwiches and then cutting them open and showing them to the camera, which is just, I can watch that forever.

It's people restoring very old pieces of machinery or equipment, which look terrible. And then after two minutes look bright, spinning new. After they spent like clearly like 150 hours where like the actual thing they restored maybe cost 1099. So it's a hilarious undertaking all that said like one of the things i like about tiktok now and i used to like about twitter and i think has happened less is that you would have these moments of someone just making an incredibly funny joke out of nowhere or an incredibly keen observation where, you know, humans are unbelievably magically talented and talent, wit, um, musical genius voice. It's all distributed across the population that in

no way correlates to like race, class, affluence, privilege, like people's ability to be funny. Like all that stuff, like is not constrained and not predetermined or ordered by all the social hierarchies that we impose on humans, right? And the internet at its best can explode that in such a wonderful way. And when it explodes it in a wonderful way, there is a moment of recognition, at least in your, you know, I think you can feel like you can laugh at a joke. They may not be feeling the recognition, but you see like a real human consciousness behind it. Well, wasn't, I mean, wasn't that the original hope of the internet, right? That it could like, that somehow if all of us are connected, that it could sort of dissolve lines of class and race and geography and help us bring us close together. So then

what happened? And then I, and not just what happened, but then I start to wonder, you know, there's all the, usually the, the tech geniuses make this argument that it's not, it's not the structure of these social platforms. It's just us. It's human nature. This is what happens. There are good parts when we come together and connect, and there are bad parts when we come together and connect. And the bad parts are because we're human and we have failings and we're not perfect, right? And so what is it about the structure of the internet that has made this worse and made the good parts that you're talking about so much rare? Yeah, I don't think I have an answer to that yet. I think what I would say is that, to your point, right? Like, I think that there's the two extreme versions of this are the tech people say it's just humans.

And if you put a lot of humans together, you get good stuff and bad stuff. Like, you get flash mobs and ethnic killing. You know, it just depends, like, how it works out. The opposite end of the argument is that it's the algorithm. You know, we hear this a lot, right? Or it's the financial incentives that are selecting for certain kinds of human interaction. I think there's a lot to both of those. Like, I would, I mean, I do think the fact that maximizing for attention, which is what at a business level all these frameworks have to do, like, that is going to have negative consequences. Because attention, again, attention is not recognition.

Attention is not human connection. Attention is a very different thing. It's colorblind, meaning if the full texture of human emotional life is in color, like attention is just black and white. Like you're paying attention to a bad tweet and the algorithm is like, woo, it's working, it's working. It's like, whoa, someone said something horrible and monstrous.

It's like, it's working. We're doing it. It's like, wait a second. That's not, no, that's not good. So you just heard from Chris Hayes, Hank Green, and Roxane Gay. The consensus? The vibes are bad on the internet. No surprise there.

But there are some things online, misinformation, the rise of right-wing extremism, our political debates, where the vibes have gotten especially bad. So I've talked to guests who are changing the way we think about these topics. And one of my favorite conversations I shared was with Monica Lewinsky about the ways the Internet has changed and encouraged public shaming, otherwise known as cancel culture. Monica has called herself patient zero of having a reputation destroyed by the internet. But today she's re-entered public life to fight back against online bullying and public shaming. A few months ago, she joined me to talk about the documentary she produced about our culture of humiliation. It's called 15 Minutes of Shame. Here's Monica. Just in the people that you chose to interview for the documentary, so for people who haven't seen it, you guys decided to interview regular people who've been publicly shamed for a range of reasons.

A few people for mistakes that they made. One person for a mistake that people thought he made, but he didn't really make. And then one young woman, Taylor Dumpson, who was just targeted and harassed online by racists and neo-Nazis. Yeah. So it really did run the gamut from someone who some people would think of as cancel to someone who was just targeted online by and harassed online by, you know, racists. Right. Which I thought was interesting that you picked a huge range of people to cover. Well, we really wanted to sort of show that there are these different aspects of cancel culture.

And that I think, I mean, to me, I think we really we would do ourselves a big service in society if we would find some other terms and kind of break this down. loaded and has such a connotation that is partisan in nature now and politicized in nature that even talking about public shaming seems like a better term to describe what you're getting at which is something outside of politics and what it actually does to individuals right exactly and and and how it's used because i mean we um you know we talk in the dock and sort of where where we landed was also this i think you you alluded to this before, is this idea of shaming for change. It was great that you, I think you guys talked about the first example of sort of shaming for change or good public shaming. It was like 2012, an LA fitness gym refused to allow pregnant women to cancel their memberships. And everyone on Twitter started going crazy and then they backed off And everyone was like, oh, we have power here. We can hold people, we can hold

powerful corporations and companies accountable. And then I think someone at the doc says, and then we sort of fell in love with our own power. And it went from holding the powerful accountable to now holding like anyone and now just going after anyone for any reason all the time. Yeah. Well, that was John Ronson who said it. And it's true. And I think we, you know, again, what we see in sort of plugging in this piece of research from the doc that was so interesting that Tiffany Watt Smith talked about with Sean Freud that the sports teams, like, it's just this was so powerful to me. It was, you know, when they measured the brain activity of people watching a sport like watching their sports team play, there was more positive activity and a positive association when the other team lost like missed a goal than when their own team scored a goal. You know, I watched that part and I was like, A, this is true in sports and I get that.

And B, frighteningly, it can be true in politics as well. A thousand percent. I mean, it's just, it's true, right? When Donald Trump loses, you know, it's like what I was thinking about the day that Donald Trump finally lost was nuts. I was very happy that Joe Biden won. And I, you know, I teared up when I saw him and Kamala Harris that night and then inauguration.

But like the day that he lost, it was like, fuck, yeah, Donald Trump lost. I hear. Yeah, I cried as well. So, I mean, it was. But that's a scary thing. What Tiffany later said, because I wrote this down because it really stuck out at me, is she said that throughout history, schadenfreude on individuals, which you guys explore, which you've lived. Then I think there's a larger effect on democracy itself and politics and this like democratic project that we're in. Because if we are in this place where we're just so excited that the other side loses and we're just going to publicly shame each other as a substitute for winning elections or passing legislation or doing any things that happen in a functioning democracy. That's the tool we use to try to take someone down.

Right. Because legal institutions have broken down. Democracy, democratic institutions have broken down. All these institutions have broken down. And so what do we have left? Publicly shaming each other. Exactly. Good fucking luck to us. Much more dangerous than cancel culture has been the rise of the alt-right. We've had a fair number of conversations about right-wing extremism on the show, and unfortunately, I'm sure we'll have more. But two from the last year have stayed with me. One was in June with Jennifer Senior, who's a journalist at The Atlantic. She had just published a profile of Steve Bannon, and we talked about the way that he manipulated the online

gaming community to seed the alt-right. So the moment in your piece that I knew this would make a great offline conversation was the story Bannon tells about his days working for Internet Gaming Entertainment, where he first learns about the size and intensity of the online gaming community. Can you talk about that? Yeah. It was really arresting and I can't take credit for it. He told this story to Errol Morris in American Dharma, by the way, and that was at a kind of the moment of peak deep platforming of Steve Bannon. And so very few people saw that and they should see it. I mean, this is the argument again for, you know, actually paying attention. I will just say, by the way, people should see it. I watched it the other night,

again, in preparation for this. And I know there was a lot of controversy after it came out. I do not think it was a favorable depiction of Steve Bannon in any way. And I thought it was actually, people should watch it to know why to the extent he is successful, he is successful with his message, I think. Correct, exactly. And I'm hoping that my piece did some of the same. I mean, Errol is, you know,

wouldn't want to compare myself to him. He's uniquely suited to that kind of project. And here's what happened. He knew just where this conversation was going to go. So he teed it up. He said, tell me about your time at Internet Gaming Entertainment, Steve. And Steve said, sure. And I almost felt like he'd told the story before

because he told it perfectly and in perfect syntax, almost in perfect paragraphs. He said that when he was in Hong Kong, that was when he first, and so this is in the mid-2000s, let's say, starting in the early 2000s. He was surprised to discover how many people played these multiplayer online games. I guess they were the World of Warcrafts and all the others, and how intensely they played them, how many hours they played them, and that people would miss work to play them,

and that they were very identified with their online avatars. And that was when he realized that people's online personas were more real to them than their regular, than their in-person personas, and that they preferred their, you know, in-person personas. And that, that they preferred their idealized selves. And that a lot of the people who were doing this were angry, isolated men. And that if you could harness that energy that they had, it could be weaponized. That was his word. It could be properly channeled and weaponized politically. And the example he gave was Dave from Accounting. Dave from Accounting was a 250-pound man who one day drops dead. And in real life, Dave from accounting has barely gone to church, has a few friends.

They have to rent a preacher who barely knows him, speaks 10 minutes. They drop him in an urn in a perpetual cemetery. And that's Dave. But if online Dave dies, online Dave is Ajax. And if Ajax dies, it's a huge deal. Thousands of people show up for Ajax's funeral. The rival tribe comes out to fight. Men and women actually stay home from their day jobs to attend Ajax's funeral. And as I was watching this, I thought, oh my God, this is what happened on January 6th., this is what happened on January 6th.

This is exactly what happened on January 6th. People showed up as their avatars. They showed up in face paint and fur skirts with their own weird weapons. They missed a day of work. They stormed the Capitol and fought a rival army. They had no longer made the distinction between online life and real life. I thought that nothing I've read describes

that the temptations and the dangers of online life better than that analogy between Dave and Ajax that he was given. And can you talk about how B Dave and Ajax that he was given. And can you talk about how Bannon's Ajax theory informed his years at Breitbart? Yeah. So when he realized that people preferred their idealized online selves, that they were their more glorious selves, but also their id selves, right? I mean, they were their angrier selves, their unfiltered selves. One of the first things he did when he got,

when he took over Breitbart was he took over the comment section and he built it out thinking, this is where people are going to be their true selves, where I can harness all this energy. And also, critically, he knew it was going to be a source of community because this is all the bowling alone stuff that Robert Putnam wrote about in 2000. All of our civic ties have been on decline for 22 years. We're no longer affiliated with churches and political groups and neighborhood organizations and the Elk Club and the Rotary Club.

You know, what do we have? Online groups take the place of that for a lot of people. Twitter takes the place for, you know, that for a lot of people. You know, it's a community, you know, it's solidarity and trolldom. You link arms. So how do we fight back against Steve Bannon's troll army? How do we change the mind of the Ajaxes he created? Well, according to YouTuber Natalie Nguyen, better known as ContraPoints, we don't reach them with logic and reasoning, we reach them with empathy. So you come along and decide that you're going to create these videos with the hope that they persuade people to think differently about a range of political and

cultural issues. Persuasion seems like a rare goal of debate these days, especially on the internet. I feel like it's even more rarely achieved. But you've heard from alt-right people who've said that your videos have dragged them out of their rabbit holes and changed their mind. Like, can you talk a little bit about how you settled on your approach and your style in these videos? Well, to me, I suppose, first of all, I don't consider what I do to be debate. And that's, I think, an important part of the reason this works. Because in debate, it's true, your goal can't really be to persuade,

certainly not the person you're talking to, because debate is, it's like sports. Like the point is to win. Trying to win. Yeah, it's like this dominant dominance kind of competition um but so i guess sometimes i what i do in videos especially you know videos from the that era it's a kind of pseudo debate i guess where uh i respond to a figure like jordan peterson right and i guess to me persuasion is it's an it's an emotional thing it's really I don't know I guess I'm

interested in the psychology of persuasion and I just think the importance of reason has been grossly overstated when it comes to how people change their minds I think a lot of times it has to do with a personality sensibility making people feel like you kind of see where they're coming from on some level is kind of this, I feel like entry point. You kind of have to get people to lower their defenses before they're even open to reasons. And that is something that has more to do with style than substance. So I guess to me, it's about, you know, I don't know, if you want to convince Jordan Peterson fans or whatever, I don't know, you have to be in some way non-threatening to them, which is, I guess to me,

I used to try to sort of achieve this with self-deprecation or, you know, like I'm trying to communicate to the viewer, I don't think I'm better than you. Like I'm not here to scold you. Like, you're allowed to think that I'm trash or whatever. Like, but also like, you know, I think then that sort of opens them up to your way of looking as you say, like, okay, maybe this psychology professor who insists

that trans people wanting to be called by pronouns is not the same thing as Maoism. Like, you know, you can sort of get them to see that that's somewhat of an exaggerated claim. I mean, but that is just back to sort of the opposite of the internet. That is just so different from how most conversation and most political conversation plays out today. I actually feel like, you know, the response to Trump and Trumpism over the last several years has been so focused on like, we're going to fact

check the right, or we're going to find the truth, or the media must actually tell the truth, or journalists have to do their jobs, and it's all about truth and reason. And I think what you're saying is that it's much more about emotion and sort of understanding where people come from. It sounds like what you're saying is it's about empathy in some sort of way. Yeah, I think that empathy is helpful in that you sort of have to know, you sort of have to be able to guess how people are feeling in order to resonate on a frequency that they're going to pick up. I think that that's a skill that's sort of not really part of,

I mean, it's certainly not very much part of a Western philosophical tradition and any kind of idea of debate that comes from that. Like it's not, you know, there's this idea in like Plato's dialogues, for example, where like, you know, I guess even Plato kind of figured it out because Socrates, they do kill him. Right. But I feel like the conclusion of Socrates being sentenced to death is like, oh, this retreat from democracy as this awful thing. And, oh, we need to create this, you know, this academy where we only let in people who are sort of who have studied trigonometry and who are open to reasoning and they'll see the truth. Well, I don't think even that will work.

I think to me, I guess I have a more like psychoanalytic view of reasoning. Like, I don't know, I feel that a lot of it's kind of unconscious and it's motivated by anxiety and identity, as opposed to being a kind of process of reasoning to conclusions from premises. My conversation with Natalie reminded me of another I had earlier in the year about misinformation. Abby Richards, a TikTok disinformation researcher, talked about how the best way to combat misinformation is through inoculation. You know, we talked about how your strategy is not to just debunk, but to inoculate people against conspiracies. How do you do that? What works?

What's the inoculation process like? I mean, it's basically like a vaccine. Perfect. The idea is that you provide somebody with like a small dose, tiny little dose, kind of like a vaccine, how you get introduced to what the virus might look like and then your immune system knows how to fight it off. It's very similar where you get introduced to either like what, you know, a specific piece of misinformation might look like or a specific tactic that people who are spreading misinformation may use. And you get shown what that looks like. And now your brain kind of almost like your immune system has this response of knowing next time you're confronted with it, like, oh, this might be misinformation. That's interesting. I mean, one of the most common questions we always get from Positive America listeners is, like, how do I talk to my family members who've been radicalized by right-wing disinformation?

What's your advice for those of us who don't have a huge platform on TikTok? My first piece of advice is always to look after yourself. to yourself so like you should never feel obligated to have to go engage with things that make you feel unsafe or just really upset like you have to take care of yourself first and foremost and then my second piece of advice would be if you do have you know friends and family that are hardcore believers and really are not in a space to get out, it's helpful to either encourage logging off, encourage them to step out of those environments and maybe go engage with some activities that they've enjoyed in the past

that aren't conspiracy related, like playing soccer. I don't know. Maybe you're, I don't know, just throwing it out there, baking, knitting, any of those or whatever. Be creative with it. But if you do have somebody that really isn't going to engage with you, if it's possible for you, I always recommend that you let them know that you're still going to be there.

And that if they want to get out, that you are there for them and that, like, you love them, you care about them, you want to see them, you know, in an emotionally healthy place and you want to support them, but you don't need to necessarily put up with all of their most wild and dangerous beliefs to support them. You know, you can be there and create some distance and be like, if you want to come talk to me, if you want my support, I am here,

but I'm not going to tolerate these hateful beliefs. It does seem like coming to the conversation with some level of empathy is probably a little bit more effective than why do you believe this crazy thing that's bad? Actually, asking why can be really, really helpful. Oh, interesting. I wouldn't go, why do you believe this crazy belief?

You know, that might upset them. But if they're like the world is run by a satanic cabal and like the pandemic is faked, be like, why did they think the pandemic? Like just play dumb and keep asking why and keep like so exactly like who are these people? Like where do they convene? You know, like what are they doing? And really just play dumb and really poke at their belief with a stick and you won't immediately see change, but you might be able to poke some holes until they eventually like can see that maybe it is just a belief. Yeah. So how does the microchip fit into the syringe that gives you the vaccine? Yes. Yes.

Just show me, show me where it goes in the needle. Okay, so can you explain to me why you're okay with phones and carrying that around all the time, but not this hypothetical microchip? Okay, so how do you feel about companies collecting and selling our data? I'm just asking. None of these conversations gave me much hope that we could effectively regulate social media, even if we had a functioning political system. The fundamental problem is that these platforms are designed for maximum engagement. They make money the more we use them, and the more we use them, the more they fuck with our brains and our world. It's pretty bleak. But even if we might be screwed as a society, individually, we still have agency. So I've spent a lot of the show focusing on ways that we can develop healthier relationships with our

screens. First, an outtake from my conversation with Jenny O'Dell, author of How to Do Nothing. One of the many places in the book where I found myself nodding furiously was where you compare social media driven news cycles in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves, whipped into a permanent state of frenzy. People create and subject themselves to new cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently. Why do you think what is it about us that keeps checking back in, even though it makes us more anxious? You know, I think I have an even worse opinion of this than I did when I wrote the book. I think I thought it was like, well, no, I still do think it's like an emotional thing of wanting to wanting to know what's going on and then wanting to be seen and heard. Right. Like wanting to be connected to other people, especially when

something dangerous is going on. Right. That's a natural thing. Right. But I but I've sort of come recently more to think that it's like, like I said, it's just the sort of like hamster wheel, like dopamine thing. Like, it just turns out that like, we love checking things. Yeah. Like, it could really be that simple. It's just that that's just something that our brains like to do. It's like a loop that you get into. Yeah. And it's sort of like this addiction to new information all the time. Like, has anything changed?

Is anything new? Is there an update? Which I don't know why. I thought about this a lot. Why do I always need some kind of new piece of information to keep going? Why can't I just be happy with what is right now? Yeah.

Well, and sometimes I wonder if that's not even necessarily a problem. Like, okay, this could, you know, this is just me, but I am obviously a nature enthusiast, right? Like I write about that in the book. I think, you know, people might think of being outdoors. It's like very peaceful. It's neutral. Like it's like very peaceful it's neutral like it's quiet like nothing's going on it's not like that to me it is an absolute riot um it's

like you know and even more if you have this loop thing right but even without the loop um or binoculars or whatever i think and i think that's what I was trying to get at in the book was like, that you can train your attention to be able to look for these kinds of changes. And I don't want to call them updates, but there are, you know, I'm looking at my window right now. This update is like a guy just walked up the street. I was just thinking this, you know, last week I was in the mountains and I was like, maybe this is like the one place where I'm never bored is actually here. Was it always like that for you? Or you talked about sort of training your attention to focus on, on those kinds of changes? Or was this just, were you always just a nature

enthusiast and this came natural to you? I think I, I don't know necessarily about the nature context. I think I sort of I'm familiar with that from childhood and I came back to it. But I think what I always had was I've always been very curious. And that's just sort of an orientation that, you know, no matter what you sort of direct that at, you're going to be looking closely and waiting for things to change and seeing that things are changing. And so I actually, you know, it's like you hear people say, oh, people need to learn how to be bored again. And I don't know that I agree. I think it's more just like you should embrace your desire to learn new things and perceive new things. And maybe the problem isn't that. The problem is the context in which you're applying it and the fact that it's being exploited by a social media platform. But in itself, I think that's like a lovely thing. It means you're like alive

and you're paying attention to things. Jenny O'Dell's point about how our attention is exploited and abused by social media was really driven home in another conversation I had with an actual expert in addiction. Here's some of my conversation with Dr. Anna Lemke, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and author of the New York Times bestseller, Dopamine Nation. So I'd like to focus in on the digital aspect of our dopamine addiction because that's what

this show is all about. You've called the smartphone the modern day hypodermic needle. Is it really that bad? I mean, I think so. So the actual hypodermic syringe was invented in the 1850s. And when it was first invented, it was going to be the solution to the growing problem of morphine addiction in the United States. The idea was that if you took the morphine and you injected it directly into the venous system, people wouldn't get addicted. Of course, that turned out to be the opposite of true.

And there are many, many anecdotes like that in the history of technology. And I do think that the smartphone has accelerated the growing problem of addiction because of the 24-7 access. One of the big factors of what makes something addictive is quantity and frequency of how often we use it. If again, you think about that pleasure pain balance, it's probably okay if we indulge in intoxicants on occasion, as long as we leave enough time in between for the neuroadaptation gremlins to hop off and for homeostasis or baseline dopamine firing to be restored. But if as soon as our balance is tipped to the side of pain, we, you know, instinctively want to get out of that place, we reach for more of our drug and there it is, you know, then naturally we're going to find

ourselves much more quickly circling the drain that is, you know, the problem of addiction. And in my own clinical practice, I saw an explosion in the early years of the 2000s, more and more people coming in with severe addiction to gambling, pornography. And really, the story was very common. It was like, well, I always kind of gambled or I always kind of used a little bit of pornography, but it wasn't until I got this smartphone that things really got out of control. Yeah. I thought it was so interesting that you made the point that the internet promotes compulsive overconsumption, not merely by providing increased access to drugs old and new, but also by suggesting behaviors that otherwise may never have occurred to us. So are you saying

that just being exposed to addictive substances and behaviors can actually make us more addictive? Oh, absolutely. I mean, access is one of the biggest and underappreciated risk factors for addiction. So the risk factors basically can be grouped into three buckets, nature, nurture, and neighborhood. There's clearly an inherited component or vulnerability. You know, the way we're raised matters. If we have parents who explicitly or implicitly condone substance use, that's going to affect our addiction risk. But neighborhood is huge. And neighborhood refers to this idea of, do you have access to this drug? Is it readily available? Can you get it easily? When you run out, can you get more? I mean, just think of a world in which you had the same access to cocaine as you do to TikTok. There would be a whole lot of people who would be severely addicted. And we

already have a cocaine problem, but I mean, just analogizing that to TikTok, it's crazy. I mean, it's just, it's infinite, right? So, and the other part of that too is the suggestibility part. I mean, humans are very, very suggestible. There are certain temperaments that are less suggestible than others. Teenagers, though, are particularly that time of life, you know, is one of high suggestibility, meaning that peer pressure has a larger effect. But we're all vulnerable to that. And when we see somebody else doing something, it suggests the idea to us and then we want to do it. That's just human nature. And that's where social media, even separate from social media addiction or addiction to social media, but social media intersecting with addiction to traditional drugs, it's really,

really pernicious. Like, you know, people making videos of themselves using a particular drug and then other teenagers seeing that or people seeing that and then thinking, well, I want to try that. So stuff like that. So I'm sure there's some listeners right now thinking like, well, I'm not that addicted to my phone. You point out, though, that addiction is a spectrum disorder. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah. So it's clearly, you know, it's clearly on a spectrum. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the fifth edition actually made a big change to acknowledge that it's a spectrum disorder. You know, not everybody is equally addicted to whatever the drug is. Some people are a little bit addicted. Some people are a lot addicted where they've lost everything as a result of their addiction. And then there's kind of this pre-addiction state where people are kind of engaging in compulsive overconsumption, but not necessarily meeting our threshold criteria for addiction. I will say that it's important to note that there's

no blood test or brain scan to diagnose addiction. We base it on what we call phenomenology or patterns of behavior. But I can tell you that the pattern of addiction to things like social media, video games, online pornography, et cetera, is identical to when people get addicted to drugs and alcohol. And it's kind of a progressive disease. So, you know, we all start out a little bit addicted and then some of us are able to kind of recognize it and self-correct. Those people probably don't have the disease of addiction or the innate extreme vulnerability, whereas others, once they get going on their drug of choice, will have a very, very difficult time

of both seeing it and stopping it even once they do see it. And I think that's a core piece of addiction is the loss of agency. Of course, ultimately, we all retain some agency or most of us retain some agency. I can think of circumstances where all agency is lost, but agency is greatly diminished in the disease of addiction. I want to close out with one final moment that's really stayed with me from a conversation I shared with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Well, just to bring things full circle, L.M.

Tsikassas, who's a technology theorist you may be familiar with, wrote this great essay early in the pandemic about doom scrolling. And he basically argues that what we need in times of uncertainty, like the one we're living through, is not more information, which probably won't give us the certainty that we're craving, but more friendship, which helps sustain us through the uncertainty. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. The more we learn about human relationships, the more we learn about how powerful they are as a source of healing, as a buffer for stress and anxiety. You know, we, the thing, this is to me, one of the most powerful things about relationships is that we have survived over thousands of years because of the relationships we had with one another. You know, the person who tried to go in on his or her own, you know, thousands of years

ago when we were hunters or gatherers, like, you know what happened to that person? They died, right? They got eaten by a predator or they starved because of an inconsistent food supply. It was the people who built trusted relationships that truly survived. And John, you know, when I think about, again, to come back to our kids, and so much of our life set around our kids when we're parents. And for me, it's changed the filter through which I think about the world. But when I think about what I want for my children, more than anything else in the world, right? It's that I want them to be happy. I want

them to be fulfilled, right? I want them to have deep meaning like in their life. But that is not going to come necessarily from the job they have or how much ends up in their bank account or how many awards they have to put up on their wall. To me, that's the thing that I worry about with modern society because modern society tells us that our self-worth comes from whether or not we are successful, but it defines our success as our ability to either accrue wealth, power, or fame. Those three things are what we define as being successful. If you have all three, wow, you're super successful. Think about the movies that we make and the books that we write about individuals that we hold up as successful.

They're often people who have achieved fame, power, or wealth. But the reality is, when I think about people, John, that I have cared for in the hospital over the years, people who are at the end of their life, the people who are actually reflecting on the most meaningful moments of their journey, very few of them talk about how wealthy they are or how much power they had. Very few of them talk about how famous they were, how many followers they had on social media. What they would talk about in those final moments of life, John, were their relationships, the people they loved, the people they missed, the people whose life they were grateful to be a part of. It's so clear, John, that in those final moments of life, when everything but the most meaningful strands of life

fall apart, fall away, though it rises to the surface are our relationships. And I just don't think that we have to wait till the end of our life to come to that realization. I think COVID has given us an opportunity to reset, to reassess, and to understand what really and truly matters in life. And that is our relationships as one another. And that's why that's what I want for my children is to for them to lead a truly connected life. It's why I think we have, I think, not just an opportunity, but an imperative to invest in our relationships as individuals, but also as a society to figure out how our institutions can support relationships. Like, how do we design workplaces that support healthy relationships between colleagues? How do we design schools that give kids a foundation for building healthy

relationships from the earliest of ages? And how do we create neighborhoods which model for our children that community is more than the family that you're born into? It can be your neighbors and those with whom you share, you know, common grounds. So this, to me me is the great challenge, you know, of our moment, but also the great opportunity. And if we seize that to build a more connected world, I think we will be more fulfilled. I think we will be healthier. They will be happier. And that to me is the best definition of success that we can hope for. Offline will be back in a few weeks.

See you soon. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez,

Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.