Offline with Jon Favreau - Monica Lewinsky on the Internet's Culture of Humiliation

Episode Date: October 31, 2021

Monica Lewinsky sits down with Jon to talk about the rise of public shaming, what happens when your life is upended by the internet, and what we can do to push against our worst instincts when we’re on social media.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

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 anything that happens in a functioning democracy. That's the tool we use to try to take someone down. Right, because legal institutions have broken down, democratic institutions have broken down, right? All these institutions have broken down and so what do we have left? Publicly shaming each other. Yeah, exactly. Good fucking luck to us. I'm Jon Favreau.

Welcome to Offline. Hi there. My guest this week is Monica Lewinsky, who stopped by the studio to speak with me about online public shaming. This is obviously a topic that she's had a lot of personal experience with. She's called herself patient zero of having a reputation destroyed by the Internet, since what happened to her in 1998 was one of the first big stories to be broken online by the Drudge Report. She stayed out of the spotlight for years after that. But around 2014, she reentered public life and started speaking out against online bullying and public shaming. She wrote a long piece in Vanity Fair,

she gave a TED Talk that has 20 million views on YouTube, and she's currently doing an awareness campaign for Bullying Prevention Month. But what I really wanted to talk to her about was her latest television project. Not the American Crime Story impeachment series that she's co-produced, though that's a great watch, but I wanted to talk to her about a documentary she co-produced on HBO Max called 15 Minutes of Shame. It's a film about what Monica calls our culture of humiliation,

how the internet and social media platforms fuel bullying and shaming and meanness and harassment. It is fantastic. I've watched it twice now. And I was really excited to talk to her about it in this conversation where we cover what it was like for her in the years after her public shaming in 1998, how she decided to reenter public life, why social media makes shaming and bullying so tempting and easy, and what we can

actually do about it. As always, if you have questions, comments, or complaints about the show, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. Here's Monica Lewinsky. Monica Lewinsky, thank you so much for doing Offline. Hi, John. Thanks for having me. So I'll start by pointing out one positive thing about the internet. It's what connected the two of us. Yes, exactly. I remember it was like in 2018, I think, I had just seen the Clinton Affair documentary on A&E.

And I think I tweeted something about how everyone owes you an apology or a lot of people owe you an apology. And some of the replies were wild. So I got like, Welcome to my world. I got a tiny window into your world. But then you and I started messaging about online bullying and shaming.

Do you remember that? Yes. Well, and also, too, I think the other inroad was Alyssa Mastrobonico. Yeah, we have a good friend in common, Alyssa. Exactly. She's the best. I think she had posted a photo of, I don't know, it was something of all you guys somewhere. And I'm like, okay, this one's cute.

That guy's cute. That guy's cute. That one's cute. And she's like, they're all married or gay. And I was like, fuck. So Alyssa is the best. Something that stuck with me from that documentary is that there have now been sort of two cultural reassessments involving you over the last several years. The first is about Bill Clinton's treatment of women that coincided with the Me Too movement. And I had sort of thought about that in my own mind for many years.

But the other one that really stuck with me when I watched that documentary was a reassessment about how the rest of the world treated you in 1998. The media, comedians, strangers on the internet. And I found myself getting so angry watching that documentary about that, like just watching some of those late night shows. So then I started going down the rabbit hole and I saw your TED Talk and read your Vanity Fair piece. And the line that really stuck with me, which is why I wanted to talk to you even before I started doing the show, was you saying I was patient zero of having reputation completely destroyed worldwide because of the internet. Can you talk about like how and when you came to the realization

that so much of what happened to you was because of the internet? I think that it was probably not until I started to see it through a different cultural lens. And that was really more around 2010. So that far off. I think that for me, it was postgraduate school. And, you know, a master's is basically like giving you a new camera lens to look at the world. And so. And what did you get your master's in? Social psychology.

From the London School of Economics. Very cool. So it sounds very fancy. Yeah, now it is. It was a great experience. I was very lucky to go there. But I think what happened for me was it was kind of this confluence of coming out of graduate school, trying to find my way in the world, really quite scarred and damaged by what had happened in 98 and coming to a very different understanding of the long shadow, the long tail, the far-reaching consequences

of what had happened. And so while that was happening, while I was trying to, you know, interviewing and trying to find a job, trying to find a way forward, this tragedy happened with Tyler Clemente. And my mom was actually the one who told me about Tyler's story. I had, you know, been away and not paid attention to the news. And like short version is his roommate had secretly webcammed him while he was being intimate with another man. And so it was like, you know, there had been these conversations around it online, and it was like, hey, I've got him on tape. I think that probably the details are a little fuzzier for me. But basically, it was this sort of anticipation of humiliation, of this being aired, this video.

I mean, nobody wants to be, no one wants to have their intimate moments on audio or videotape, you know, shared without their consent. And so he jumped from the George Washington Bridge a few days later. And I, the experience with my mom, how distraught she was, you know, and she just, she was crying and she just kept saying his poor parents, his poor parents. And that sort of struck a different tone with me. And obviously we talked about things that had happened over the years, but this was just a different way into the story. And it was sort of a moment where, you know, I started really looking at what was happening. I think that it had changed in that social media hadn't been around in 98.

And so what it meant was there were a lot more voices. So in 98, what was different was this, the kind of vastness of it, the immediacy, global, right, instant. And now we had, adding to that layer, voices and voices and voices of people, you know, which makes a difference psychologically. I hadn't thought about that in 1998. So much of what happened was until I started watching the American Crime Story Impeachment, which is excellent. Drudge's involvement, Matt Drudge's involvement, played by Billy Eichner, did a great job. Drudge's involvement in this and the Ken Starr report just being put on the Internet. I sort of watched all that.

I was like, oh, yeah, this was an Internet. This was one of the first internet scandals. No, it was. And it was, so I think that there were kind of these, I don't know if this is the right way to say it, but almost tentpole moments of the 98 scandal interconnected with the internet. And so one being Drudge and that being the first time that the internet broke a story before traditional news. And then with the Star Report, there was, I can't remember where I read it, but it might have been a wired piece where the reporter was saying that it was the first time that if you didn't have access to the internet, you couldn't be a part of history. Like you couldn't be a part of how history was unfolding. So to all of a sudden have something that everybody is trying to dial up, as we did online, and for there to be no safeguards applied to it as well. I don't know if people really understand that when you experience a

public shaming, especially one like yours, it doesn't just go away when the coverage dies down and everyone else moves on. Like, what was it like for you in the years after 1998, once sort of the scandal receded from the headlines? You know, it was horrific for many, many years, in part because it wasn't as if the scandal actually ever fully receded. Yeah. Because I think the main people who had been involved were powerful people. And also for political reasons, which was their right, the Clintons stayed on the political stage. And so I think that kept the story alive as well. And it was, I mean, it was, I don't know, for two decades, there was at least one story that mentioned this in the news, in the world,

somewhere every single day. And I've heard you talk about it affected you, your job, your... Oh, I couldn't get a job. So I couldn't get a job. I, you know, I'm, I was very fortunate to come from a family that was able to help me. But I didn't come from the kind of family where they could just support me for the rest of my life. So it was, and also your sense of purpose and identity and self-worth that we all derive from from a purpose, from a career, from our work, you know, so it was and then the mental health aspect of it. And how did you make the decision to reenter public life in 2014? It was had I been able to get a normal job, which is what I was pursuing when I got out of graduate school. I was trying to get a normal job, trying to, you know, just get back onto a normal developmental track. And that didn't work. So it really was a bunch of stops and starts of I didn't want to re-enter the public conversation, but I also recognized with the help of actually one of my professors from LSE that I had coffee with

a couple of years after. And she pointed out to me that there was no competing narrative and that I had let my narrative run away from me because the people in power and with power, whether that was the media or, you know, Democrats or Clintons, whatever, whatever those things were, that that had become something else. And that, you know, and I had learned in her class, you know, about power, about power in narratives, about power in communities. And so I think that I wasn't ready to hear that, but she planted the seed at the right time. And so I think that was sort of something I turned over as I continued to do just really deep personal healing work. And then it was really this confluence of, you know, sort of, you know, what was happening in my healing work. Tyler Clementi, it was sort of all snowballing towards wanting to, you know, find the right way to use my voice. And I tried a couple different ways that didn't work.

And as my mom always says, rejection is protection. It's like, and it was. So my editor at Vanity Fair is David Friend. And David was really the one who, you know, I had been working on these other ways of finding my voice. And David was the one who then ushered, we went and had a secret meeting with Graydon in his secret office. And, you know, Graydon said, well, if you can write a first personperson essay and it's good enough, we could do that. And if not, it could be an interview. And I thought, I don't want to do an interview. I'm glad you did the essay.

Yeah. I don't want to be seen and mediated through someone else's lens, even if they saw me positively. It is very different. You've had enough of that at that point. Yes, exactly. That's all you've had is someone else's lens. So I was terrified the night before the essay came out because they think, you know, it was a gamble for Graydon and Vanity Fair. And it was certainly a gamble for me. And, you know, I had had dinner with one of my best friends.

And we had dinner the night before and she gave me this card. It had this incredible Anais Nin quote in it. Let's see if I don't butcher it. And the day finally came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. And it just really encapsulated that moment for me. And then the essay came out.

Younger generations were the ones who kind of said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Because I think sort of my generation and older, certainly the older generations felt very much, I think that they hadn't been, you know, we don't change unless we get prodded, right? And so I think for them, it was like, oh, what's she doing again? Who wants to hear from her? And of course, she's, you know, popping up an election and this and that and the other. And the younger generations who came to this story, you know, who maybe had heard of me from rap songs, as I like to joke, but, you know, who I think from that essay started to look at more, were the ones who said, wait, here are the facts. Okay, here is this person who is 20 plus younger years than every other person involved, the least powerful person involved.

And the lion's share of the blame and consequences were placed on her. You're millennial, right? Yeah, I'm like older millennial, so I'm 40. consequences were placed on her i yeah well you're you're you're not you're young you're millennial right so i'm yeah i'm like older millennial so i'm 40 okay um and but my wife emily is like 30 and emily's view this whole thing when she yeah you guys should we have a emily love moment yeah no you guys you guys have met and talked um but her view this whole thing when she sort of learned it all for the first time, was like, how are the Democrats still allowing Bill Clinton to speak in public at conventions? It's just like it's that much of a shift for younger generations to hear this story for the first time. Which is why I'm so glad, you know, it was one of the things that was very interesting. The Clinton Affair documentary that came out in 2018 that I participated in was directed by Blair Foster. And so to, you know, and she was, someone actually attributed this quote to me, but it was Blair who said it, that when they were doing the research, there were no history books about that time period

written by women and a women's perspective. And so, you know, for her coming into, you know, part of what was interesting to me about participating in that was she wanted to speak to the women, that this was about a platform for the women's voices. And that, you know, was being filmed in the process of Me Too 2.0. You know, Tarana Burke taking it online and it sort of burgeoning online, which is one of the beauty things about the Internet. I was going to say that there's a part of the gatekeepers in both the media and politics and everywhere else sort of like falling away and everything being the wild, wild west online. There's a lot of bad to it, which we're going to talk about. But there's also it can elevate people's voices who haven't been elevated. And sort of broaden the aperture of who gets to talk and who gets to tell their story.

Yeah. That's an interesting way to put it. Right. And gives power. It's sort of what sort of it like distributes power by a whole different spectrum. I'm going to talk about another documentary, which is your most recent documentary. Yes. Which I'm so glad that you did.

It's called 15 Minutes of Shame. I think it's just outstanding. I found it moving, surprising, thought-provoking. Directed by Max Joseph, so I didn't direct it. He did a phenomenal job. You did a phenomenal job. I can't recommend it enough. Thank you.

How did it come together? And what were you hoping to achieve? You know, Max and I were both sort of sniffing around the same ideas of a project around the same time in 2016, 2017, something like that. And we were formulating working on this before cancel culture was even as widely used as it is as this umbrella term now. What this really is, what we've hoped to do, and I think have done actually at this point, I can say is be a conversation starter. Not as if people weren't talking about cancel culture already, like, duh.

Even, you know, both sides of the aisle, you know, if both sides of the aisle are using a term, you know it's... Well, I was going to ask about that because I think one of the challenges of talking about public shaming is that it has become as politicized as everything else, particularly the term cancel culture. So for conservatives, cancel culture is when liberals publicly shame someone for saying or doing something that liberals find offensive. For

liberals, cancel culture is either a fake problem that conservatives made up, because sometimes it is, or as Roxane Gay says in the documentary, it's actually consequence culture because it's about holding people accountable for the harm that their words or actions have caused others. How did you guys think about the politics around this issue when you were making the documentary? The point is to be a message that gets as wide as it can get to as many people as it can get. And it's not about scoring points with the left or scoring points with the right. So it was hard.

I mean, I think we all had to, in various ways, step back and make sure that we were trying to be as politically even as we could be. Well, it's 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. You have 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. So it really did run the gamut from someone who some people would think of as canceled to someone who was just targeted and harassed online by racists and neo-Nazis. So it really did run the gamut from someone who some people would think of as cancel to someone who was just targeted online and harassed online by, you know, racists. 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 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. I think that the phrase cancel culture is almost useless to me in thinking about this issue now. Yeah. Because it's so 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 how it's used because, I mean, we talk in the doc and sort of where we landed was also this, I think you alluded to this before too, is this idea of shaming for change. It was great that you, I think you guys talked about the first example. It was like 2012 in LA Fitness. Jim 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 dock 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 Rontan 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 Freuda, that the sports teams, like, it 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, 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. Yeah. You know, it's like what I was thinking about the day that Donald Trump finally lost. Yes. Was not. 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 you. 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 is at its most intense when we are divided into rival tribes. And that's a very dangerous place for society to be. Right. Which brings up a bigger question when I saw this documentary.

Like, there is the effect that public shaming on the internet has 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 anything that happens 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. But if we'd had 90 more minutes, we could have gone into opposition research. You know, I mean, it is right. Like that is the whole goal of opposition research

is I think that, you know, their top layer, the outside of it is, OK, we want to call someone out for lying and showing that their position is not. But that's not really what people are going for. And where I think that's a problem is who the fuck is going to want to run for office? I was going to ask, I had this question to ask you. The dearth of candidates and who the fuck is going to want to do this job? I, you know, I always get the question like, would you, you know, what's your advice? And I always tell people like they should, they should run for office because we need more people in office. And then someone. I will not take your advice. I'm not a young person anymore, but –

Would you run for office? Would you ever run for office? And I'm like, well, I give all this advice that everyone should run for office, but like to run for office today, it's not like you're worried about like skeletons in your closet kind of thing. It's that you think, okay, I have to subject myself, my family, and everyone I've ever known to this mess on the internet. Yeah. Just for things that you say publicly and purposefully. Right. Not like hidden things even.

And the fake news part of it, you know. I mean, we saw that. I think not. You look at what had happened to John Kerry, you know. So, I mean, that is. I was on that campaign. Oh, you were? I got a front receipt of that, yeah.

Yeah. That was also sort of the beginning of a lot of, yeah. Exactly. So, I think that there's, when the motivation is money and financial, people, they're not focused on the consequences of what they're doing in the same way that they could be. Right. Well, I do want to say one of the reasons that the motivations can be financial is how shaming now happens on the Internet, on these platforms. And you guys talk in the doc early on about how public shaming isn't new. Public shaming has been around since the dawn of time. So how much do you think the current phenomenon of public shaming is human nature and how much is being fueled by the Internet, social media and these platforms? I don't know that I could give it a percentage. You know, I think that they are both present, but there is, you know, what was fascinating to me

and kind of one of the favorite parts of working on the doc for me were these history pods that threaded throughout the stories and the experts and that section, you know, and sort of realizing that public shaming had been a social tool that had been used. You also, as a person, you had to see the expression.

When you threw your stone, you had to see the expression on the person that you, if you had good aim, pelted. And I do wonder how many people picked up two stones. So we don't know that, right? But moving once, you know, the printing press came along and this now became something where you could make money from gossip columns and that, Rupert Murdoch, and that started to seep into the culture. You know, we had to cut this from the doc, but something that was interesting to me was I remembered being a little kid going to the grocery store with my parents. And how it was sort of you would come to the checkout line and that's where all the candy was and all the tabloids. Of course, I remember that. You know, and so this idea of, and there was this move from the tabloids being on a newsstand

to be in a supermarket. And what did that mean for our culture to this be represented in where we go for our literal nutrition. Yes. You know, it's quite a metaphor for what happened. You mentioned the stones, picking up the stones and having to see the person's face who you throw the stone at. You guys interview a neuroscientist in the doc, Dr. Helen Wang, who said that when someone is just a name on a screen with some text, it's not enough for our brain to perceive them as human. And that viewing people's faces in body language is actually what helps us understand someone's mental state and what they're feeling.

And that to me just sort of unlocked the whole thing. Because when you're on Twitter, when you're on social media, first of all, Twitter strips away context. It strips away nuance. It strips away nuance. It makes you just like it treats people as like one monolithic aspect of their personality. And if you can't see them and everyone seems anonymous, you might tend to be a little meaner. Yeah, which is which is sort of an unfortunate aspect of our human nature. And I think, you know, and that, you know, what Helen Wang was talking about there, too, goes to, you know, many aspects of the kind of intertwining of human nature and technology. And I think that that's really where we need to be better, is sort of recognizing certain things we're not going to be able to change, because that's how we are hardwired.

Right. There's human nature, and we have to deal with that. Right. Exactly. But, you know, it's the difference. It's like, you know, when the social media companies become a diet of like sugar only foods, that's kind of what has happened is that when they are poking our basis and basic instincts, you know, that is, we end up in a very dangerous place. Was it hard to get some of those people to participate in the documentary who had been publicly shamed? Yeah, you know, I think there was...

Did you talk to any of them? Yes, I did. Yeah, I did. And it was a very humbling moment for me to hear from some of them that the reason they felt safe participating was because someone who was an EP on the project had experienced this themselves publicly. So it's, you know, talk about kind of like giving a purpose to your past. It just, it was a very, I was very grateful to hear that. And it added a lot of responsibility. How hard was it for you to watch like some of those stories? It was, it was, it was very challenging. You was interesting, and your listeners will appreciate this, is because of COVID, I couldn't go on the shoots. And so we did a lot over Zoom,

and sometimes we could see, but most of the time we were listening. And so it was just, you know, you just hear things, you hear things differently. Yeah. An emotion lands differently when the only, you know, it's like the energy and the words and the tone. And it was, you know, it was heartbreaking. And they were really generous in how they shared with us. And they all sort of had a, I think that they all had a bigger goal in mind, too, of not just people seeing them and seeing their story, but wanting to help shift and change that, you know, this doesn't continue to happen to people. That people think twice before they pile on without knowing the facts. You know, John Ronson likes to talk about this sort of three-day rule, you know, this idea of like, if we could, if we could just wait three days before we decide to pile on and pile in,

like usually some- How about like 10 minutes? Yeah. Well, I mean, I've had this idea for a while, you know, for the social media companies that it's sort of this, you know, like, how do you if we could stop a tidal wave, we would. Right. And so how do they sort of like implement something where you're not affecting people's First Amendment right? Everybody's whatever they've tweeted, it will come out, but that they slow it down. If it hits a certain name who hasn't, you know, in a different way, even though there wasn't social media, but from 98 is, it is a tsunami. It's a tsunami of hate and negative energy coming at you. It doesn't matter what the specific words are, you feel it, you know. And you can probably tell yourself a million times that, oh no, it's fine. These people don't know me and stuff like that.

But I'm sure that doesn't. It permeates. And also, too, you know, and as you saw in the case with actually several other people, but particularly Taylor, you know, I think in 98 what we had was this sense of it was this moving of offline onto an online existence. Like, oh, this is now available. You know, it's now on VHS and CD-ROM. Yeah, right. It's like it's, this is, this that happened out here is now also available here. And what's changed now is what's happening here on the internet is now bleeding offline more.

Right. So when people get doxxed, I mean, that to me is just, I think that that is somewhere where, you know, this idea, particularly for women and people from marginalized communities, but, you know, to have your address released online without your permission is fucked up. Incredibly fucked up. Incredibly fucked up. You know, and also, what do they call it? Swatting? Like, people will send the SWAT team to, I mean, it is just, it is, I mean, to me, there is no excuse for that, you know? Well, you hear some people say, you know, log off,

put the phone down. Yeah. But it's just, that's not, first of all. Particularly for young people, like, you cannot. In today's environment, we're online all the time. It's sort of impossible to cut off completely. And then, as you said, more and more, it's bleeding into the real world. I mean, from doxing people to the January 6th insurrection. Sure. I mean, which is really terrifying. Let's talk a little bit about solutions.

Bye-bye. nice to see you thanks for having me what do you think is the what do you think are some of the most effective ways to go about solving this or making it better at least I think there's a couple categories obviously there's sort of

there's the platforms the technology companies and what they can do and that's regulation and passing laws and whatever else they're sort of our own behavior. What do you think?

I think you could take both of those categories, which you've separated well, and also put them into short-term and long-term. Okay. Right. So, like, we may not have the biggest impact in working with our own human nature, but it's something that we can start doing five seconds ago. Right. So for me, and, and these are, these may sound like Pollyanna things, but I, you know, I talk about it like click with compassion and that, you know, the ideas around that are thinking about, you know, using your click to actually help someone feel better.

So I think it's something we, people don't think about about, this irony of when you are in the middle of a storm and everybody is saying awful things about you, you are also invisible. The real you is also invisible and what it can mean for someone to just say something positive or even send you a private text or a private DM or whatever that is, is meaningful. I think also I try my, because I'm not immune to any of this either, but like trying to be aware of how many things do I click on, you know, that's clickbait. Like how, when so-and-so gets divorced, do I need to read three to five articles

or am I okay with one? And so there's just, there's that level, like we've done a, you know, we've had a mindfulness movement in our society. And I think we just need to incorporate our online behavior into that a bit more. I do think it's interesting, the clicking on the, you know, the clickbait divorce story five times. One thing people need to keep in mind is when you do that, you're just making

someone else money. Exactly. I know you're satisfying your own curiosity and base desires, but you're making these platforms and these media companies that are trafficking this shit, you're just making them rich. That's all you're doing. If you think of a cigarette as dopamine, you're buying a cigarette. That is what you're doing. Every time you click on those things is you are buying your dopamine hit. Has this affected your online habits? Yes. Since you've taken up the, what has changed since you've really focused on this issue?

I cannot be as snarky and catty as I am in private. I'm on Instagram privately. That's sort of where I may let loose on a snarkier, bodier side of me. But, you know, I'm mindful of, I think, when there's someone who's usually political stance that I just is so abhorrent to me. I really try to be mindful of not resharing or making comments about how they look, you know, about things that are, you know, kind of coming just like low hanging fruit. And so that's as tempting as it is. And I try to watch my language around those things. So it's, I've deleted tweets before that I've just kind of been like, oh, come on, you can do better. I wish I had that much restraint. Since I've been doing this show, I've been trying to do

that more. I mean, I think this is back your point about sort of like as snarky as you want to be in private. That goes back to the humanity or human nature versus technology thing, which is like the impulse to be snarky, to be nasty once in a while is something that like, it's just human nature. We're never going to be able to fight. But I think one thing we can do is like, what I'm trying to do more of is you have your group of friends, do it to your group of friends, do it privately, do it to someone else. Like there can be release valves that are not public. Right. Exactly. I mean, I had an experience a few years ago where a friend of mine and I were watching, like we were going to watch the Oscars together,

but over the phone, right? And she has kids and we were like, oh God, look what she's wearing. Oh, she looks amazing. And it's like, oh, God, look what she's wearing. Oh, she looks amazing. And it's like, oh, she gained weight. Oh, she lost weight. Oh, her plastic surgery. And then I realized her kid was in the room. And so it was just one of those things where you sort of stop and think, OK, even this is telegraphing certain kinds of messaging. OK, now that may be offline, but it's, you know, it all seeps in.

It all becomes part of the culture. And that's, you know, I think that those are ways that we need to change. And in terms of the platforms, and I actually think they need to sort of go fishing for a week. I think like shut everything down for a week and like work nonstop and and reconstruct yeah and really sort of because um i think i said this before but this idea around you know when we walk into a building we assume that the architects and the engineers have structured this building for safety well and and these platforms have not been constructed safely. And to like switch metaphors, like, you know, they're often presented as, well, it's just the public square and it's neutral and

people are going to do here what they do. But, and you know, you guys make a persuasive case about this in the documentary. The algorithms push you. They push all of us and they push us towards anger, towards rage, towards meanness, towards all the things that drive engagement, that drive the worst of human impulses that are already there, but it sort of magnifies them. And that's how they make money. They make money off of our rage. And the sort of safety laws don't apply, right? So in the public square, I couldn't just walk up to you as a stranger and punch you in the stomach without consequences, you know, and yet you can do that online, you know, there's, but I think also we see the human

nature part of it too. It's like, okay, we're in LA right now and I have road rage and it's like, I, you know, it really is. And it's, it's very interesting because there's, I I've observed it when I'm in the car. And then when I'm in New York when I'm a pedestrian. And so it's like happened to me where I'm in the crosswalk and someone turns and I'm like, fuck you, and give them the finger or, oh, my God, my soliloquies in the car of the person in front of me. But don't you have that moment too when that – this has happened to me sometimes when I feel myself getting angry in the car. And then the person drives by me and I see their face. Even that moment, I'm just like, okay, maybe they're having a bad day. Maybe they weren't paying attention.

Again, it's the context. I think that context and nuance need to be part of a conversation, need to be sort of have a seat at this table. Yes. When we're having the conversation around public shaming and social media and how we're looking at things to change. Because hopefully what people get from the doc, you know, all of the people, Taylor's doing really well, but she's still affected and Taylor is an example of someone who did nothing wrong she did all the right things and beyond she was the target of racist attacks on the campus

she was the first black student body president first woman black student body president at American University she was the target of all these racist attacks on campus and then the fucking Daily Stormer and the neo-Nazis there saw the story about her being attacked on campus and then decided to dox her and attack her just worldwide, all over the internet.

And she had to deal with that. Yeah. And I mean, and so I think that, I think what people see and, you know, what we hope people see from the doc too is that, you know, this analogy of, we all look at the car accident, right? But how many of us think five minutes, five hours, five days later, God, I hope that person's okay or I wonder what happened to them. We never think about them. And I think that's really what we, you know, that's what people will see in the documentary stories that they thought they knew and really come to understand different aspects that way.

Well, there's this incredibly moving focus on grace and forgiveness at the end of the film. And Taylor Dumpson, who we were just talking about, we talked about solutions. I want her to run for office. For sure. She is such an extraordinary young woman and she decides that she's going to sue these neo-nazis yep um and that's that's her solution to that and she wins the lawsuit and the settlement includes she decides what the settlement's going to include and she includes this face-to-face meeting with one of

the people who harassed her who was a young person so i think that was that was also you know like the restorative justice to do but so go ahead and no and and she decides that um it's going he needs to renounce white supremacy as part of the settlement and then he she meets with him face to face and he apologizes and the apology was important to her because she said she really believed in rehabilitation, restorative justice and all this kind of stuff. And then another man that you guys talked to basically who and I got this email and I just broke down sobbing. And she was like, what's wrong? What's wrong? And he said, someone was nice to me. Yeah.

You know what? I could relate to that experience. I was going to ask. Yeah, I would. For me, it was more letters. Like people, randos would send me letters. They would? Mm-hmm.

Did people apologize to you? I have gotten letters where people have apologized. Actually, it was really, it was quite impactful for me. After my first Vanity Fair essay in 2014, there was a letter that came in from a bunch of women who were very religious, who were in a religious group. I can't remember the exact details, but they sort of, they re-evaluated their own behavior and wanted to apologize, which was lovely, you know. But I think that sense of, and again, kind of going back to that idea of you really can't know when someone is drowning, kind word, a smile, a hey, I saw what happened, or I'm sorry, or hope you're doing okay. Like, I know it sounds corny, but it really, and that is, that's easy for us to do.

You don't have to be the person to go, you know, if you feel bold enough to be the one to try to, you know, like, hey, hey, let's break this up. And that just that ability to show grace and forgiveness. I always think about this quote that's used a lot around rehabilitation of, you know, people who've been incarcerated and committed crimes. And Father Greg Boyle, who runs Homeboy Industries here in Los Angeles, and he does sort of gang rehabilitation, he says this all the time, which is, you know, you're always more than the worst thing you've ever done. Yeah. You know, and I do think looking at this documentary, like people make mistakes. They sometimes make horrible mistakes. Sometimes they make, they don't make mistakes, but everyone thinks they make mistakes, right?

So it's like, like I said, it's a big range. And sometimes they don't make mistakes. but everyone thinks they make mistakes, right? So it's like I said, it's a big range. And sometimes they don't make mistakes. Oh, they're just targeted. But like whatever it is, everyone has fucked up. Right. Exactly. I mean, it's sort of it's, you know, what sort of comes up for me was this idea of dignity. You know, and I think that is something that I think that's really something as a society I wish we were focusing on a bit more because it's, you know, whether you're living on the street, whether you are, you know, even if you've deprived others of dignity.

That's the hard one. That's the hard one. Again, going back to kind of what Roxane Gay, it doesn't mean you shouldn't suffer consequences. Correct. Or Kara Swisher calls it accountability culture. So I think that that's, you know, but we do need to be more nuanced. We do need to tease out, you know, those kinds of things because I do think dignity is important. I mean, I think consequences and accountability can coexist with dignity and

forgiveness and grace, right? They just, they have to. Last question I'm asking all of our guests, what's your favorite way to unplug and how often do you get to do it? Well, I guess, I mean, I don't know how to answer that. So, I mean, do you mean like literally be away from the phone? Like you're not on the phone, you're not online. Oh, yeah. I would say, God, I don't, you know what? I like to, I mean, I'd like to sort of leave my phone in the car and go like when I walk sometimes. So, it's just, I will leave my phone at home for several hours and go out.

Great, that's a big one. So, I will do that. I think that, you know, binging on a show, that's, you know. Look, we're also online that leaving your phone in the car for a few hours or binging on a show while you're not on your phone, that's a win. Yeah. So it's a good, it is, you know, I do. And also, you know what?

I will pride myself, maybe it's because I'm old. I am someone who, unless I'm expecting an important call or text, my phone is either in my purse or turned over at a meal. That's wonderful. Love that. I think that the conversation, the connection, that's important to me and being present that way. Yeah. We all need to do more of that. Yeah. Monica Lewinsky, thank you so much. Thank you, John.

Great. This was great. Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. Our producer is Andy Gardner-Bernstein. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music.

Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, and Sandy Gerard for production support, and to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Milo Kim, and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.