Offline with Jon Favreau - Pope Trump, Zuckerberg’s AI Friends, and the Shocking Truth of How Teens Live Online

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Lauren Greenfield, director of the acclaimed FX docuseries “Social Studies,” sits down with Jon to talk about the year she spent shadowing a group of LA teens as they navigated their very online lives. The kids gave Lauren permission to screen record their phones for the duration of filming, and the result is an intimate, frenetic and often horrifying account of what it's like to be underage on the internet. But first! Mark Zuckerberg is crushing the podcast circuit with relatable anecdotes about his underground bunker and replacing human friends with AI companions. Meanwhile, his frenemy Elon Musk is making a not-so-triumphant departure from DOGE. Jon and Max discuss whether the Department’s next step is a full-scale American panopticon, then say a little prayer for AI Pope Trump. "Social Studies" curriculum and resources: https://www.learner.org/socialstudies/

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Use offline to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. It's the Wild West compared to other media. Other media is all regulated. And, you know, even parents and young people are bracing the show even though there's a lot of hard content on it.

That 10 years ago, I think we would be really nervous about showing teenagers, but I think everybody knows they are seeing it anyway, starting with pornography at a really young age. That was terrifying. So the exposure is out of the bag. Like, there's no way for parents to protect their kids from the kind of imagery and content that, you know, if they're in this generation, they've already seen.

And so I think we need to help them process and navigate it now. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, an extremely talented filmmaker who most recently created the documentary series Social Studies, Lauren Greenfield. So Social Studies is an incredible look into young people's relationship with technology. Lauren follows a group of teenage students here in Los Angeles for about a year.

They gave her access to their lives and the screens on their phones, which were recorded during filming. So the whole offline team has been raving about this documentary. Absolutely. So we reached out to Lauren to talk about how it came together, what she learned about the way social media has transformed, the way young people are growing up in America, especially after the pandemic. As a parent, I can say that it is both alarming and very important to watch. Absolutely. Yeah. I really thought I knew the deal with like what was happening

with teens on their phones and had like a vague sense of it. I had no idea. I had no idea what was going on. Yeah, same thing. I had the vague sense, but it is, it's chaotic. Yes. That's one, because everyone expects you to say horrifying, but it is, it's like frenetic and chaotic watching it. And she does such a good job of capturing this because you're seeing the screens, what they're doing on the screens and what they're doing in real life offline.

And it's just, there's just so much sensory shit coming in. I'm like, how does anyone focus, think, do anything? Well, it's fascinating to see the kids working so hard to navigate it too. Like, they really know what they're up against in a way that I certainly didn't. Yeah, no, me, same. All right, so we'll get to that interview later, but first, got some news. Our boy Zuck is out there hitting the podcast circuit hard.

He really is. He was on This Past Weekend with Theo Vaughan and the Dwarkesh podcast, hosted by Dwarkesh Patel. Spoiler, Mark absolutely crushed it. He did, he's great. He talked to Theo about how he likes to quote, raw dog reality. He said it like three times.

Loves raw dog reality. In like the first minute. In this raw dog reality to Mark Zuckerberg is not drinking coffee. Is not drinking, that's the joke, yes. This is a really hot joke. Hot joke. Hot joke.

Two years ago on Twitter for a single day that he's so happy that he has. Although, did you see the coverage of the Conclave that's going on right now? I sure, yeah. And did you see the CBS clip? No, it's a good- There's a CBS clip going around

and the commentators on CBS who are, they're saying, oh, you're watching the Vatican. One thing that the Cardinals aren't doing is following this all on social media or Instagram. I think because they don't have their phones. I believe the kids call this raw dogging. You know what, if that's what the Cardinals are doing up there, it's as good a process as any.

And I say hats off, giant red hats off to all of them. Catholic Church does believe in raw dog. And we do know that. Congratulations to whoever it's CBS just told the conclave. They were all raw dogging each other. That's CBS. It's the, their demos are, they've got the right demos. Is there anything more dangerous than a middle-aged media professional?

And I say this as one half learning the lingo of young people. No, no, but it is fucking entertaining. All right, so at one point, that was the Theo Vonn interview, and Dwarkech asked Zuck about artificial intelligence in their interview. First of all, there's a lot in both interviews. I would say I encourage you to listen to both of them, but you know. They're quite boring. Not for the faint of heart.

Yeah. But when he was asked about artificial intelligence, here's what Zuck said. The average American, I think, has, I think it's fewer than three friends. Three people that they'd consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or something, right?

I guess there's probably some point where you're like, all right, I'm just too busy. I can't deal with more people. But the average person wants more connectivity connection than they have. Is this going to replace kind of in-person connections or real life connections? And my default is that the answer to that is probably no.

I think that there are all these things that are better about kind of physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don't have the connection and they feel more alone, um, a lot of the time than they would like. So I think that a lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around, um, I would guess that over time we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable and why the people who are

doing these things are like why they are rational for doing it and like, and how it is adding value for their, for their lives. I have been told that the humans would like more friends are in demand for human relationships. So I humans would like more friends. Are in demand for human relationships. And so I will invent them more friends. Personally, I don't need them. I don't do friends. I think that three is too many. I think that one is too many.

I know. I kept thinking about the bits from the Facebook whistleblower book about him talking to the executive team about settlers of Catan. And it really, it's like, oh, he's like in his 30s, one of the richest, most powerful people in the world. And you see he like doesn't quite know how to navigate these interactions with another human being. So wants to do it through settlers of Catan. And this is the person in charge of all of our relationships now, I guess.

It sort of explains everything. It does. Doesn't it? Yeah. What do you think is the solution to the loneliness epidemic, spending more time with fake friends on your phone? Is that, I was saying just before we recorded this, I feel like this interview, these two interviews,

like what Mark Zuckerberg said in these interviews represents everything that offline stands against. It really does. It's like the perfect... Yes. Not just the... And we'll get... I think we should get into the rest of the interview too, but this part specifically is the absolute like... Okay, so he helped create the social isolation epidemic in America and now he wants to take advantage of it to make money off of it by addicting us to AI friends so that we don't develop human relationships. Like I keep thinking about all of these stories that you're seeing about college kids not

learning how to write essays ever because they have chatbots do it for us. And I kind of think Mark Zuckerberg's dream is that we don't learn how to develop real human relationships because we just rely on these AI chatbots forever, which is a great solution for him personally to make a lot of money, I guess, off of the isolation epidemic by just making it permanent. At one point he talks about, he's asked about like whether social media is bad, or bad. Yes, yeah.

And it's a very revealing answer. And he said, I don't think so. My understanding of the current state of the research is that there isn't kind of a conclusive finding that this is negative for people's wellbeing. And then he said, so there's sort of the media part of social media and there's the social part of social media. I think the interacting with people to the extent that's helping you build good relationships,

I mean, friendships and good relationships is one of the things that correlates the most strongly with positive wellbeing and like feeling good about your life and all that. The media stuff, I mean, I think that's more entertaining, you know, I think you can, you know, people want things that are fun, right? People want to be entertained for sure. It doesn't necessarily like correlate with good well-being or bad well-being. So what's interesting about that is he can tell the difference between like actually building relationships or interacting with

people through social media and the media part. And yet everything he's building now is pushing people towards the media part and not the social part. Yes, that is a good point that the algorithms that they are pushing all of us towards on all of their platforms are fewer and fewer actual human connections and more and more endless scroll. Also, I should say the thing that he said about like, well, the research isn't conclusive. That's been the meta official corporate line for years.

Like they pushed it to me. It is simply not true. The research is overwhelmingly consistent that social media is incredibly harmful to you psychologically, emotionally harmful to your politics. And they have like cherry-picked like one or two studies that slightly complicate this to push this line that like, oh, it's impossible to say, but it's just like nobody believes that

except for the like one or two basically in-house reporters at Facebook who just write whatever they say. I mean, I think I will not keep reading Zuckerberg quotes from this, but I thought this one was quite revealing in the same answer about the social media and whether it's good or bad. And he says, people use stuff that's valuable for them. One of my core guiding principles in designing products

is that people are smart. They know what's valuable in their lives. Every once in a while, something bad happens in a product and you wanna make sure you design your product well to minimize that. But if you think something someone is doing is bad and they think it's really valuable, most of the time in my experience,

they're right and you're wrong. You just haven't come up with the framework yet for understanding why the thing they're doing is valuable and helpful in their life. That's the main way I think about it. If someone thinks that abusing drugs and alcohol is right, if they think, I don't know, if Donald Trump thinks whatever he's doing is right,

if other people, there's no morals, ethics, anything. Whatever everyone wants to do is good by me. Yes, he has really summed up the Silicon Valley self-justification perfectly, which has always been that they start by building products that are deliberately made to be addictive. They are deliberately, and he kind of says this with the friends thing, that like,

we know that you have this desire for, for example, social connection, we're gonna design a product that does not deliver that, but that exploits that need and that it digs you through some infinite scroll, whatever, and then we are going to say, well, you're using our product more and more. That means that you are a smart person who has independently made the decision to use this product. And how dare these know-it-all journalists try to say otherwise and say that you're not getting value from this service when they know that that that's not true, because they used to survey people, and they used to survey their users and ask them,

are you enjoying this service? Do you want to be using it as much as you are? And they would always say, no, I'm using it against my will because I find it hard to turn off. And he knows this, but they've still, I think they have managed to really like gaslight themselves into believing, well, if people are addicted to our services, that means that it's creating value in their lives. But it's so like, even if he were, even if his platform was somehow neutral and not addictive, it's a crazy thing to say, if people, if people think something's valuable to them, then they're always right. That's just a ridiculous thing to say, you can't have a democracy in that kind of way. You can have politics. Like this is great. Right. But he is, of course,

he's ignoring the fact that it is not a neutral platform because everything he's doing is trying to get people to like, there's his whole, his whole business model is built on making sure people spend more time on his platform. Right. So you can't just say that the platform, maybe some people just like Facebook. Some people just like the fucking AI slop that I'm feeding them now, instead of the human connections that they used to be making. So I think that is kind of what's really interesting

about this entire media tour that he's on and his like re-re-re brand that he's on. Cause I don't know if you noticed this, the MAGA mark is over. Yeah, no. There's no chain. He's out there in the VR Ray-Bans. He's not like, Theo Vaughn is like kind of MAGA, but like he's not going on Rogan anymore.

He's talking to like friendly tech adjacent people who are going to like, like Dorcas like ask some real questions, but it's not like a journalistic interview. Right. But what he wants to talk about is the business. And I think that what really came through to me here Is that he doesn't really have a business strategy right now He doesn't really have a business plan like the thing that he really wants to talk about are The VR glasses and AI but if you read between the lines, there's no there's there's no business plan for either

There's no business strategy the VR glasses is part of the reality lab segment, which lost four billion last quarter, four billion and a quarter. And that is their 10th straight quarter of losing on average $4 billion or more. And that's after like there's been a quote unquote spike in the sales of the Ray-Ban. So there's no business there. And the other thing he wants to talk about is AI, but there's no product he's pitching. Do you know what I mean? Like if you listen, he's talking about like, oh, the llamas, which is their AI product. And it's like, these are the benchmarks we're trying to hit. But Dorakesh keeps asking him very soft versions of like, okay, but so what?

And he doesn't have an answer because there's not a thing. Like that's why he's talking about chatbot friends. He talks about how he imagines it will be ad supported someday. Right. Even though it will be free for people. Maybe one day it will be a business. Even the way he talks about that.

He's like, and so you're scrolling through your feeds and a real starts and you're looking at it and it seems like a person, but it's actually just like an AI bot that's trying to sell you a product. Like that's his, that's it, that's the business model. Which, who knows, it might fucking work. There is one thing that I think they could do

is I think they could supplant a lot of the advertising industry. There's a very interesting story in The Verge about this, about how something that AI could do is to quickly generate and then iterate on like AI-generated ads basically, so that you will see like a different version of the same ad every time because AI is constantly testing it. So the idea is that instead of going to, you know, McCann Erickson, you go to Facebook because their cheap AI builds a shitty ad,

but it's a lot cheaper and they iterate on it. You know what I thought was really interesting were the two things he absolutely did not want to talk about, which were Donald Trump and Instagram, which I thought was striking because that used to be the centerpiece of his whole grand strategy. Mark Zuckerberg's entire plan for the future of his company was we're gonna partner with Donald Trump and Instagram is gonna be our big growth product which it is but now Donald Trump fucking hates him and he's maybe gonna lose Instagram

Yeah, he also there's a couple of the more funnier things lighter moments. I guess in the Theo von interview There's a couple of the more funnier things, lighter moments, I guess, in the Theo Vonn interview. Small dogging. Yeah, we talked about his apocalypse shelter in Hawaii. Yes. Which he described as more of an underground storage situation. That's a funny way to talk about your Hawaiian

apocalypse shelter, but I don't know if you want to talk about that, like this is what I mean, like he's not even trying to brand himself anymore. He's just showing us who he is and it's kind of a bummer. It's kind of a little sad. He does. He's at one point, he talks about how he's the most awkward person. I know that kind of broke my heart.

Like, I really feel like I'm seeing the Jesse Eisenberg character from the movie. It's real. It's so real. Yeah. I, it was, it was very funny when the Yovon was like, where'd you go to school? He's like, Harvard. They actually made a movie about all that. Yeah, it's just two brainiacs going at it.

Just a real meeting with a man. How about when they asked Zuckerberg about like, what was his best date? What was his most magical date? And he said, he said that he personally, he loves working with artists. And so he commissioned an artist to build a sculpture of Priscilla to put on their front lawn. Wow. I mean, that's a very lavish gift.

She apparently did not like it that much. Okay. Wow. Billionaire problems. You know that feeling when you commission a famous artist to make a sculpture for your wife and she doesn't really like it? Fellas, anybody can relate to that one. I know, I know. I had a nickel, I'd have enough to buy a sculpture.

It is so, it's... It's... It's for her, it's of her. Oh, did I not make that clear? Oh yeah. Wow. It's of her. Okay, that would be creepy. Oh yeah, no, it's not just any, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, no make that clear? Oh yeah. Wow. It's of her. Okay, that would be creepy.

Oh yeah, no, it's not just any, oh I'm sorry. Yeah, no, it's a sculpture of Priscilla. Imagine seeing this, your significant other puts a... A sculpture. Yeah, you wake up and there's a sculpture of you on the front lawn of your underground shelter in Hawaii. Julia does make Play-Doh sculptures of me all the time that she leaves around the house as little gifts,

but I think it's sweet. Well, didn't they have to sell the hospital that he bought for her? Okay, wow, we're seeing the sculpture and it is terrifying. It's green? She looks like a Smurf? Now I know why she didn't like it.

She looks like the T1000 and a Smurf as one, which is pretty cool, honestly. Get out of there, Priscilla, get out of there. What do you think it's like to be with Mark Zuckerberg all the time? I think we saw, I think the Theo Von interview was probably pretty good. That's probably it. You know, just a little robotic.

He's just raw dog in reality. No caffeine, no nothing. What is the guy doing? He should, he just loves to code. He loves to build, loves to connect people. If I can quote Danny DeVito and I want to make clear that I'm quoting someone because I try not to use this slur generally because it is gendered. So I don't mean it is gendered specific, but Mark Zuckerberg, retire bitch, is what I would

say. It's going to be better for you. You can find out what your wife likes so that you don't have to buy her weird sculptures as presents. You can just buy her, like write her a nice card. He's going through something. I mean, aren't we all? Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg.

I was gonna say, yeah. And his assignment of AI friends goes. Elon Musk goes through something, Mark Zuckerberg goes through something, Donald Trump goes through something, we all go through something. I think just to bring it back to the AI friends thing, I think it is both just topian and terrifying

because that's clearly the world he envisions for us. But I think this also underscores for me that they don't know what the fuck to do with AI. Like today it's AI chat bot friends, but yesterday it was personal assistants and tomorrow it's going to be like writing assistants. And then the day after that, it'll be something else. And like, none of these things are real.

It's just things that he's throwing out because he's trying to speak to, I think basically Wall Street and say like push up our stock price. I agree. I do think what I have come to think about AI is, and I guess this is a bias from everything we talk about on the show, is what we know is that it will, and we talked about this a little last week, it will continue to suck people into the platform to use more AI and continue all of the problems with social media, making you lonelier, giving you the illusion of connection when it's not really a connection,

it's just gonna amplify all of that. And it really bums me out because there is a version of AI that could be really useful and really have it, like there was just this study. I'm sure some of it will be, I'm sure a lot of it will be. Of course, but the fact that, like there was just this study that came out that looked at AI chat bots ability to substitute for primary care physicians in doing diagnostic

visits and it found according to the study, if I was reading it correctly, that it outperformed PCPs on average. Wow. Which is great. And it is great not just because it's like a better way to get a quick and better like diagnostic visit, but also because we have a doctor shortage. Now we have that because doctors are a monopoly that's controlled by a cartel but that's another podcast. I don't want to get the doctors mad at me again. But my point is that like there are a lot of

use cases for AI that could be really socially productive and could make money could be like win-win for everybody but But because the technology is being developed and controlled by people like Mark Zuckerberg, who just want to pull people into his ad-supported, like, slop business, that is unfortunately not where the bulk of the investment is going, and it's a shame. Yeah, it's tough when antisocial humans are behind social media. Right. Yeah.

Listen, maybe if he keeps going on Theon Vaughn, he will learn that it's nice to talk to a person maybe Forward-facing activities mark forward-facing activities Offline is brought to you by Haya typical children's vitamins are basically candy and disguise filled with two teaspoons of sugar Unhealthy chemicals and other gummy additives growing kids should never eat That's why Haya created a super powered chewable vitamin in disguise, filled with two teaspoons of sugar, unhealthy chemicals and other gummy additives growing kids should never eat. That's why Haya created a super powered chewable vitamin. Haya is made with zero sugar and zero gummy additives,

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order. To claim this deal you must go to hiahealth.com slash off. This deal is not available on their regular website. Go to h-i-y-a-h-e-a-l-t-h dot com slash off and get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults. In other news, a couple weeks back, two of our good friends at the Atlantic, Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzell, published a joint piece about what they believe will be the next phase of DOGE, the quote, American Panopticon. Basically, an American version of the Chinese surveillance state based on the fact that Elon and DOGE have gained access to sensitive data across the federal government on just

about every American. Ian and Charlie made the case that with government data now centralized and advancements in AI making huge amounts of data more searchable, you can easily imagine what an American surveillance state could look like. They write, quote, it could, for example, target for harassment people who deducted charitable contributions to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, drove or parked near mosques and bought halal certified shampoos. It could intimidate citizens who reported income from Trump antagonistic competitors

or visited queer pornography websites. It could identify people who have traveled to Ukraine and also rely on prescription insulin and then lean on insurance companies to deny their claims. Dark. Yeah. Dark. It is. How much should, how much this scary? There was also a New York Times piece similar to this just about Doge scooping up all the data. Yeah, a lot of smart people are calling attention to this. I'm glad they're doing it. I would say I'm like medium high on this, like six out of ten, seven out of ten. I think they're like, it's worth separating out there. Two

arguments here. One is that the vast repository of government data on all of us, which is huge, could in theory be pulled together to create an Orwellian surveillance state. And then, but then part number two is that this is what Doge is doing. And I think the first is true and important. And I think the second is like, maybe a little bit of a stretch, but you know what? It's useful to call attention to the first. Yeah, I do think it's a little more complicated. My guess is that it's a little more complicated

than Elan and Doge went in there and were like, we got to scoop up data on everyone so we can have our surveillance. Totally, right. That doesn't mean- It couldn, right. That doesn't mean. It couldn't happen. It couldn't happen. Or doesn't mean that others are using their work

or will use their work to do that. Or could use their work. Could use their work. And we've already seen this around, we're seeing this around immigration. Yep. And so they are very eager to track down every single person in this country who is undocumented or even legal residents,

green card holders that are like, totally legal immigrants. And that is an extremely hard thing to do, even with the data that the government has on everyone. The data that the government has on people has traditionally been siloed. So the IRS doesn't speak to social, you know, all this kind of stuff.

And by putting it all together and throwing in AI, yeah, they're gonna be able to track people down more easily. I found myself, you know, I'm still, I guess, elder millennials, but I'm still young enough to be part of a generation that's like, ah, privacy, they know everything about us, they have all of our data, what's the big deal?

I'm much more worried about it now that Donald Trump is president again with a bunch of creepy authoritarians around him. Clearly want to do authoritarianism and clearly want to do retaliation against political enemies. I think that I- Because it's not as, it's not as you'd think before, everyone knows everything about me and so what are they going to do? It's like, it's not necessarily that. It's not as, you'd think before, everyone knows everything about me. And so what are they gonna do? It's like, it's not necessarily that.

It's not just, here's a hidden fact about you we're gonna embarrass you with. It is like, we're gonna track you down. We're gonna know where you are. We're gonna look in your past and see if there's something that we can make up a reason to arrest you or detain you or bring you in for questioning, right?

I totally agree. I think the version of it that I am worried about and the version of it that we're already getting is a little bit different from the one that is being warned about like in this Atlantic piece. Like we can look at how this is already happening specifically with immigration, like you mentioned. Like there was a story that came out a couple of weeks ago

that Palantir is helping ICE to build a tool to geolocate immigrants, including legal immigrants, based on all this federal government data for mass deportation. Now, mass deportations are not happening currently. And I was talking to a friend of mine who covers immigration and it was like assigned as of like January 20th to cover the mass deportation program.

And he was kind of telling me, he was like, the thing that no one really knows how to talk about is that not only are mass deportation not happening, but there's no real preparation for it. There's no indication that they're actually coming. But what is happening is that we are getting a small, but extremely scary number of targeted like attacks, basically by the state on seemingly random immigrants

to harass and terrorize them or ship them off to a torture prison in El Salvador. And that's not the same as mass deportation. Yeah, and they're sort of using it as a cost-effective shortcut. Exactly, right. To scare the shit out of everyone else and hopefully get people to self-deport.

Exactly, right. It's meant to terrorize the rest of us because maybe I'll be one of the 200 people who gets targeted with this. And it's, I think, also meant to kind of like satisfy the Trump supporters who get to feel like mass deportation is happening, even if it's actually not. And that is a very scary scenario. And I think that it's different than what is being described in these articles of a

like China style mass surveillance, omnipresent police state, Orwellian scheme, not because Trump is not evil enough to do it, but like that kind of a system requires a huge, huge like set of systems and bureaucracies in every city and state and province and every agency. Yeah, federalism makes it a little tricky. But also the fact that they're incompetent and the fact that they just like fired

hundreds of thousands of people. Like what China does requires millions and millions of people working together and like concert to do to target everybody. But what we are getting instead is this like arbitrary, hyper-specific targeting of people for basically just like signaling to the rest of us, probably personally directed by Trump or one of the boneheads around him in a way that is, is

very, very bad. It's just like a little bit different than like everybody would be targeted. And I think it's important to emphasize that both because we want to understand what's happening now without worrying too much about a hypothetical that I don't know is actually going to come to pass. And I think we want to understand what the purpose of the version of state surveillance that we're getting actually is. Yeah. I do think I worry a little bit that AI is going to speed it all up. And so all of these systems that would have taken all these people in coordination to

build will be easier. I don't know enough about all of this to see how much easier and how much faster. But I think your point is well taken. We should note that Elon's work at Doge is finally winding down. Oh boy, what a time it's been. He's told reporters he's going to be spending less time with Doge. Recently told Tesla investors he'll be spending more time back at the company. What do you make of our pal's departure?

I mean, I think he just failed. I think that he was just like a catastrophic failure at what he set out to do. He did a bunch of unpopular cuts that are actually perversely going to cost more money rather than save anything. He took a giant hit on approvals that also hurt Trump by extension. The cabinet revolted against him.

And then I think the big thing was he fucked up the Wisconsin state Supreme Court race. So there's like- And his company and fucked up Tesla. Yeah, that's right. And also Tesla is like really kind of in the shitter, which it was, but people forget this, before the election, its stock was on a really concerning slide because the business model just fundamentally didn't work anymore. And that got reversed because people were pricing in a corruption premium and they're like,

oh, he'll just get access to all these government contracts. And maybe he will, but also he might not. So like the company could be kind of sunk, but all of which is to say like, there's a read out there that like, oh, he's leaving because he accomplished his real secret mission of installing the like Doge supra government surveillance state.

And I don't think that's what happened. I think that he just like flailed and fucked up. Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of people lost their jobs and a bunch of kids in Africa are dying. So he did, that is another legacy of Doge. But you're right, like it doesn't even seem like Congress will codify a lot of the cuts. That is true. And the cuts are,

he promised two trillion, then it was down to one trillion, then it's like 165 billion, then some of that was bullshit, so it's like under a hundred billion. It's gonna cost us like 150 billion in order to get like 60 billion worth of cuts. Yeah, especially because of what they did at the IRS. So the IRS is gonna collect less tax revenue

from rich people. Plus you can't fly into Newark anymore. It's like... No, that's not advice. I don't have can't fly into Newark anymore. That's like. No, that's not. Great job. I don't have any inside information on Newark, although I am flying into Kennedy now. Oh yeah, no, I won't be flying into Newark

until this whole thing blows over. And I don't know what this whole thing is. Yeah, it was a weird, fucked up, horrible experiment and I'm so glad that it's over. I don't know if I can claim vindication on my take that he was gonna get axed because he was gonna piss off Trump though. Yeah, right. He outlasted what I thought he would do by a significant degree. I think Trump

still likes him. And I think Trump is genuinely happy about some of the stuff he did. I think he thinks it was great. Yeah, he does. Because he doesn't know any better. Alright, well one lighter, at least funnier thing before we jump to the interview. Of course, as I mentioned, we're taping this on May 7th, which is the first day of the Papel Conclave. Who are you voting for in the Conclave? You're part of the Conclave, right? I am part of the Conclave.

As one of the progressive elites. I am the Cardinal of Hancock Park. Okay, sure, yeah. They did for me. No, and so we couldn't pass up the chance to talk about the fact that the President of the United States and the White House chose to broadcast to the world an AI-generated image of Donald Trump as the pope.

Something about the White House, official White House account tweeting it out was the thing that was like, oh wow, we're really, we've just got a crazy toddler, which I knew beforehand, but you see these little reminders that it's like the institutions are gone. It's just this wacko. And he was asked about it and he was like, I don't know, someone posted it, I don't know. It's like, it was your account, pal.

And then the wife was reposting. And then he said, the Catholics loved it. He just, he knows, he's in touch with them. Although the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, he was like, they're in. Well, he's, listen, he knows, he's in touch with him. Although the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, he was like, they're in. They all, well, he's, listen, he knows the Catholics almost as well as he knows the Jews, which famously he knows so well. I hate to say it, I thought it was funny. I thought the whole thing was pretty funny.

I just laughed. I don't, it's not like I thought it was the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. I just, like, this is a challenge with, like, you know, doing politics and religion and everything else via meme now and all that kind of shit, because, like, can people still be offended? I can't, like, that shit can't offend me anymore. I know. You know?

I mean, like, as a Catholic, not a devout Catholic, but a Catholic, like a devout Catholic, but a Catholic, like I am very offended about his policies towards immigrants and the poor. And everything, like he is, do not think Jesus would be happy with Donald Trump in any way. Making himself the Pope. Right, if Donald Trump like,

if Donald Trump even moved just a tiny bit towards where Pope Francis was, like, he can fucking post all the AI Pope memes he wants. I would be totally fine with that if he just moved his administration just a little bit in the direction on just about any issue. Just about any issue. Yeah, when I first saw it, I was like, unbelievable. I can't believe he was so disrespectful. And then I was like, okay, if a politician I like did this, what would I think? And I had to be like, I'll be honest. I would think it was funny. If AOC was like, I'm the Pope now,

I would be like, that's good. Could you imagine Fox? If AOC did that. We would become so Catholic over there. They would decide that they are suddenly so Catholic at Fox News. Well, I am really pulling for a progressive Pope on other Francis. You know what? If they want to make Trump Pope at Fox News. Well, I am really pulling for a progressive pope, another Francis. You know what?

If they want to make Trump pope, that's bad news for the Catholic Church, but on net, are we all better off? Ship them over there to the Vatican. Mike Walzit. I think we need a... There's a Hungarian guy who's like the Orban choice. Really? Yeah, he's like conservative. Wow.

Okay. We don't want that. But I think we're, I think- It's good to have. Do you have someone who you're rooting for? Yes. I'm rooting for this guy, Luis Antonio Tagal. Okay.

He is, he's Filipino. Okay. Progressive. Oh yeah, yeah. He'd be the first Asian Pope. Sure. And he's also like, they think he's the, there was someone was writing about it, I think in the ringer, that he's like, he's huge on Facebook and in TikTok. And he's like,

so he's very, you know, he communicates via social media. And he like, he's known for, you know, he stood against Duterte and is very progressive on poverty, migration, LGBTQ issues. So he would be like the progressive, the more progressive choice. There's a couple others because the one thing about this conclave is now I'm just doing like a Pope segment, a conclave segment. But Francis appointed like a huge amount of the Cardinals who were voting. I saw that, yes, that he kind of like packed the courts a little bit. Yeah, and there's fewer, so percentage-wise,

there's fewer from Europe, and some are fewer from North America, and there's more from Asia, more from Africa. Right. So we'll see. I mean, that's where all the growth is for the church, I know. So now that you have a guy, are you gonna have George Clooney write an op-ed?

Yeah. Kind of massaging him in there like you did with Kamala. Yeah, the Hungarian guy must go. I mean, look, if you did it with the Democratic presidential nominee, I'm just saying, can't you pull it off again? And look how it turned out. 10-10, no notes. Listen, it was worth a shot.

It was worth a shot. Could have been worse. All right, before we jump to the interview, some quick housekeeping. When we're in charge, the Next Generation's Guide to Leadership by our friend Amanda Litman is out next week on May 13th. Amanda's the co-founder of Run for Something. She spent years helping launch young political careers.

Now she's sharing insights that will help the next generation of leaders make an impact without burning out. She interviewed a ton of next generation leaders, over a hundred, Maxwell Frost, Versha Sharma, all kinds of great people she interviewed. And we had her on Pod Save America the other week. It was a great interview, check it out.

Go pre-order, when we're in charge, you can pre-order it now at crooked.com slash books, or wherever you get your books. After the break, my conversation with documentarian, Lauren Greenfield. Offline is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Summer's just around the corner and the folks at Mint Mobile have a hot take.

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Lauren Greenfield, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me. So I watched the first episode of Social Studies last night. And afterwards, my wife asked how it was and I said three things. It's absolutely terrifying. You have to watch it immediately and we can never let the boys have fun.

But I do hope that our conversation persuades more parents and kids these ages to watch, watch together. And I'd love to start just by having you talk about how the project came about in the first place. Yeah, well, in my work in photography and filmmaking, I've been looking at youth culture for a long time. My first book was actually about kids in LA in the late 90s and how they were affected

by what I called the values of Hollywood, fame and image and materialism. And I went back to the subject, wanting to look at how they were affected by this new media, social media, with kind of a hunch that all of these values that I looked at before were amplified. And that's... But I was right out of school when I did the first project, and I was a mother when I did social studies.

And so I also could see with my own kids, who were 14 and 20 when I started this that they were like from two different generations. The older one was a reader, had a huge amount of focus and attention. So the older one born in? Born in 2000. 2000, okay. So like older side of Gen Z. Yeah. The younger one 2006 had never grown up in a time without a phone,

also as the youngest kid, got devices more as babysitting, and basically got all of his news on TikTok, had more issues with attention. And during COVID, I started to see a connection between, like, screen time and being sullen, ornery, depressed. So I wanted to dive into how this media was affecting kids but I also felt like it was this black hole where we really didn't know what was on the phone

and what exactly they were getting. And I always feel like, you know, that's the thing in documentary is like to get those details. So I created kind of a social experiment, which was different from my prior documentaries, where I had a cohort of kids who we were going to follow for the year, but with full access to their phones and their

phone content. Was that a, was it hard to find students who were willing to do that and parents who were willing to approve of that? I think it was a big commitment for the kids and a big trust on the part of the parents and the kids. I think that the teenagers who are in the show are amazing and I think a lot of teenagers feel really touched by this issue now. And so they had skin in the game, like they wanted to get into this inquiry.

I think they were all afraid too. But they have been like, it was a huge process, like they gained trust as we went through and actually shared more and more and more of themselves. And now a lot of them say they were really changed by the experience and have been like doing Q&As with me and talking, we're doing outreach to schools and they've been talking to other students.

And I mean, you can see kind of huge changes in them during the year. And I think now looking back, this kind of study of their own behavior was really valuable to them and I think to teenagers watching, which is really gratifying for them. Just from a social science perspective, was it a random cross-section of kids? Was there any concern that it would be sort of like self selecting and that you'd get the most online kids? And then also once you figured out who you were gonna follow, were you concerned that they might be acting differently

knowing that this is a documentary? All really, really good questions. So it's a really diverse group. So they're diverse socioeconomically, racially, in terms of gender identity, but also diverse in terms of their relationship with social media, their history with social media, and how much they're on it.

Like, I mean, they're all on it a lot, I should say, but like one kid, Jonathan, almost never posts. That's very much the departure from the norm. Most of them post very frequently, but like one is an entrepreneur, one uses it for his music. One girl, Sydney, had a history of being slut-shamed, and so that she really brought to the table.

Everybody had a kind of different history with it. What I was looking for, and it wasn't random, I was looking for, first of all, kids that were open to it, that I felt could be honest and sharing of their experience, and also these different experiences. I started by doing kind of mini interviews with like over 200 kids, and there were certain things that just came up again and again, like body image and bullying and social anxiety and entrepreneurship, activism.

So I wanted with our group to be able to represent a lot of those ideas. But then there's kind of a beautiful randomness and serendipity that happens with documentary. And so- You just get more comfortable. Yeah, like Ivy was somebody that I just liked. She was creative, she was cool, she was interesting.

But I had no idea until I got into it that her family had been kind of broken apart by conspiracy theory and algorithms on the internet. And I had no idea that she had a brother who would become her sister during the course of our filming. So those are just things that kind of enrich the experience. But yeah, and then we have a group of like 25 kids that we would meet in discussion.

Right. And then we just really focus in on about 10 of them. One of my first reactions was that living at home, away from their friends on their screens during the pandemic did like profound damage to this generation in ways that I mean it's sort of cliche to say that now but I think we still haven't quite figured out how serious and far reaching this is. You started collecting footage for this project in the summer of 2021, opportune time for the series, right when the kids were going back to school for the first time since the

pandemic started. One girl says the pandemic amplified the need for connection, which was why she spent so much time on her phone. Another said that people, and this one really stuck with me, that people in real life are more intimidating to deal with than people online. Did you get the sense from any of these kids that the connections they were making online

were fulfilling substitutes for relationships in the physical world? Well, they definitely were substitutes. And I think during the pandemic, they were necessary substitutes, because it was like they're, and I think that's why, they were necessary substitutes because it was like their... And I think that's why also parents just kind of gave in to screen time as much as possible

and had very little control over it because they were also on school that way. Unfortunately, a lot of times you see kids, when you see their screens, multitasking at school. So while they're learning, they're also playing a video game or talking to a friend. It was needed during that time, and it was their only connection. So while they're learning, they're also playing a video game or talking to a friend. It was needed during that time and it was their only connection.

I think the unfortunate part is that the devices are so addictive as we see and as they say, that those addictions persisted post pandemic and that the behaviors that changed really also persisted post pandemic. So it just kind of amplified everything, but it really amplified trends that were already happening. Yeah. So I definitely don't think it was because of the pandemic that we're seeing it, but you're right.

It was kind of the perfect natural experiment because they were just on their screens more. And so I think the influence grew. Yeah. One important dynamic you document, most of these kids have gone viral at some point. You ask them this, they say they have. Virality leads to fame. Fame in some cases leads to money or at least status or at least some sense of self-worth. But what it takes to go viral is oftentimes behavior

that could be harmful or damaging or just antisocial, substance abuse, provocative photos, bullying. I think we actually have a clip of a moment in the show where you're talking with the kids about this dynamic. Who in here has gone viral? Show of hands. Oh my gosh, everybody's gone viral. With Kim K, she got famous for the sex tape. And so with platforms like TikTok, where anybody can get famous,

that's like, if you put out content like Kim Kardashian did, maybe you'll get famous. If I could become a multimillionaire with a giant company and like be as famous as Kim Kardashian, I would release my sex tape. A sex tape. She's all set up now. Her whole life is set up.

She's super famous. She has like millions of dollars. She has her own company. So does all of her family. Her mom definitely like inspired that whole thing. Oof. How do you think the lure of fame or just attention is one of the big problems with kids in social media?

I mean, I think that's a transformational thing that kids have always wanted to be popular at that age. Like that was kind of a core part of being a teenager, getting accepted by kids at school. But now to be popular means thousands or 10,000s of likes or going viral. And it's quantifiable, it's comparable, and the kids are painfully aware of all the metrics. And so, and how you do that, like, that's kind of the new coming of age. And we hear these stories from Ivy and from Sydney and Marin talks about you know I would release a sex tape if that would give me that kind of fame and lifestyle. Sydney really breaks down

the story about how she had this passion for photography and she started posting like her photographs of sunsets or things she shot, no likes. Then she starts posting pictures of her body, lots of likes. And so she leans in and continues to do that in ways that I think for parents are kind of shocking and potentially dangerous. And she would say the same thing today. But I think that it's a natural reaction to the value of fame.

And you had asked earlier, like, did I feel like they acted different because they were being filmed? One of the really nice surprises was you would think when fame is such a value that they would all be like doing things to get more airtime or to be on TV. And actually, that wasn't the case at all. Like you can see when they come to group, they really bring themselves. They're not curating their clothes,

they're not wearing makeup. Somehow this project had a kind of honesty to it that they really liked and wanted to be a part of. And yet in the show, we see different perspectives. So we also see what they project online, where they're kind of their presentational selves. And then we also follow them and verite with their friends, so we get to see like who they are with their friends.

So we actually can see like behind the curtain, like when, you know, Ellie's lying to her mom, or when what she's saying on a text is different than what we're seeing with our own eyes. Yeah. And that's like the exciting part about the medium. And then we superimposed with animation what was going on in their phones. So you could process both at the same time. Well, and so much of it is about their social circles and school, but also to the point about fame

and they're mentioning Kim Kardashian, it seems like the role models that they are seeing on social media, and you see this in the show as well, they could be with their friends, but then they're also seeing like Kylie Jenner, posing or something. And if your role models are people who are famous

because they got famous, right? Or they're just influencers. And I worry that there's a generation of kids that are not thinking about what they want to be when they grow up, but who they want to be, or who they want to be like, or that they just want to be famous. They want to make money. And you can't really blame them because that's all they see on their screens.

And that's actually how success is measured in their world. I mean, that's something I've been observing for a long time is that when you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, they say rich and famous, and that's not a job. And the way you get there is, you know, these things that create engagement, which as you said is like bodies or, you know, even like for male body pressure, like they talk about guys have to be like buff and look a certain way.

Kids of color talking about how it's the Caucasian body type that gets more attention. Risky behavior, Ella talks about that, getting more attention and how kind of enticing that is. And then you get into social contagion that can be negative or destructive, like who's the thinnest, getting into eating disorders, even canceling as a way to get popularity. So it's definitely a slippery slope when fame is the goal. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Mental health awareness is growing, but there's still progress to be made.

26% of Americans who participated in a recent survey say they have avoided seeking mental health support due to fear of judgment. When people hesitate to get help, it doesn't just affect them, it impacts families, workplaces, and entire communities. This Mental Health Awareness Month, let's encourage everyone to take care of their well-being and break the stigma. The world is better when people are healthy and happy. You're not gonna get any judgment from us.

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I have to say, and obviously there needs to be a lot more research into this, but I'm a political nerd. And so one of my first thoughts watching this is, you know, there's been all this discussion after the last election, Gen Z swings to the right, to Trump, But some people have started to look at the data and older Gen Z pretty much stayed the same politically. And it was the kids who went through

the pandemic that swung to the right the most. And you know, there's a lot of theories for this and people well, were they on TikTok looking at like propaganda from the right stuff like that. And I'm sure there's some of that. But I also think just the act of being on the phone all the time in the pandemic and what that does to relationships and the behavior it incentivizes is the kind of behavior and values that matches up with more MAGA than I think traditional forms of politics. Like I can kind of see it, but there's so little trust in the system, they kind of want to shut things down.

Things seem funny and silly and it sort of levels their experience in life. I don't know if you've ever, if you've thought about the political angle in any of this or if they've talked to you about this. I mean, I don't see it, I don't see it like that one direction, like going right. What I see is the propaganda side. Like I think my youngest son gets his news from TikTok. And I think whether it's pro-Palestinian protests

or Black Lives Matter, which they were influenced by during the pandemic, or right-wing politics like Charlie Kirk or Andrew Tate, I think that there's a huge impact. And so I think that the danger with this generation and the opportunity for the opportunist politicians is that they're so manipulatable.

Yeah. And it does, I guess, it flattens politics in a way and I feel like increases polarization. Yes. So that what you lose is the subtlety and nuance of political discussions and taking positions on certain issues and everything becomes very black and white. Yeah, and I think one of the things that is very hopeful in the show, so please watch to episode five,

because it kind of gets harder and harder, and then there's hope at the end. But one of the things that happens at the end is the young people who, when they're in their group discussions, don't have phones, say how incredible it was to actually connect face to face. And I think for somebody from my generation, it's like, isn't that just the easiest thing in the world?

But no, it's actually not an obvious or common thing for this generation to have that much opportunity to really connect seriously, vulnerably without phones. You go to scenes of parties or social occasions, and it's like parallel play for young kids, they're all separately on their phone. Yeah. In school too, there's that scene in the classroom in the first episode.

I'm like, how is anyone focusing on school? Or what the teacher's saying because they're like talking to friends, they're playing a game, they're doing a million different things. Like the pace of life just felt so, which is you captured so well, just feel so frenetic in a way that's like dizzy.

Yeah, and when they slow down and talk to each other and have discussions, it was also really powerful because they saw other kids going through the same problems or issues, pressures that they were, sometimes for the first time. I think that's the exciting thing about young people watching the show,

is they also put themselves in their shoes, and there's kind of somebody for everybody, and see that somebody else is going through the same thing. So like the conversation you had with your wife, it's been really interesting, is a very different reaction from parents than from young people. Like parents are like, it's terrifying,

I know I should watch, I'm scared to watch. But like actually yes, watch, because it's the way you find out what's going on with your kids. Young people don't find it terrifying at all. Like, they feel seen, they feel relieved, because it's like a documentation of the kind of problem with no name. Like, what's been hiding in plain sight for them? All these things they're feeling that they haven't had a place to process.

I was struck by how self-aware they all are, and just they seem introspective and wise beyond their years. They know that social media is bad for them. They say it explicitly, but crucially awareness isn't enough and they still can't quit. And then the line that has really stuck with me is, I think Jonathan might say this, that social media is both a lifeline and a loaded gun. And we talk all the time about phone addiction and screen addiction and social media addiction

on the show. But I can't think of too many addictive substances that could be objectively described as also lifelines, maybe some medications that are abused, I guess. How do you see that dynamic play out with these kids? That it is the lifeline versus loaded gun thing? That's really interesting that you say that because a lot of my work has been about addiction in some ways and my first film was about eating disorders

and that's kind of the same kind of thing. Oh, I guess, yeah, that's lifeline. Lifeline. I think that, yeah, I mean, they need it to communicate. It's the way people communicate now. Kids need to be social, like teenagers, that's a big part of it. And yet, there's so many dangerous things. And I think that's why I don't see it as a binary.

People are like, should we have it? Should we not have it? No, we have to have it. But it doesn't have to be this way. Like, it is this way because the tech companies architect it to be exactly what it is. Like, it's engineered by humans for maximum engagement. And we saw from the TikTok research that was leaked

that they know exactly, same with Meta, they know exactly what's going on. And so there's no surprise there. And yet we're allowing kids have access to loaded guns. For me, it's kind of like the cigarette research. Like I hope that now that we see this connection between social media and suicidal ideation and eating disorders and these harms

that parents and young people and even the brands that advertise will demand a kind of cleaner, safer space. Do you think that we can get these social media platforms to be more on the lifeline side and less on the loaded gun side? Or is it just, I mean, because we can't get rid of them. But do you think that there are algorithmic changes or structural changes that we could make that would make these healthier? Absolutely. We've already seen empirically a lot of

algorithmic changes since TikTok stopped and started again, since we have a new president. We've already seen the dampening of political protests and critical posts. And that just shows, you know, how we can have any kind of space we want. Chinese TikTok is completely different. It's educational for young people. It's propaganda. I mean, and we know from advertising

and the way brands use it, that it's completely targetable too. So, I mean, in Australia, they're age gating under 16. I think that's a great idea. People are always like, you know, how can they know what age it is? You know, kids are, but like, I think it was Scott Galloway who said like,

they know everything about you. Like, they probably could figure that out. So I definitely think it's possible. It's the Wild West compared to other media. Other media is all regulated. And, you know, even parents and young people are embracing the show, even though there's a lot of hard content on it, that 10 years ago, I think we would be really nervous

about showing teenagers, but I think everybody knows, they are seeing it anyway, starting with pornography at a really young age. That was terrifying. And there's no context, so at least- Like third grade, as young as third grade. At least with the show, they have context and to deconstruct it and through peers in their own voices,

like saying what kind of processing in real time. And we've also made an educational curriculum with the Annenberg Foundation. It's on learner.org. There's a parent guide. There's a way for teachers to use it in school for media literacy. So the exposure is out of the bag. Like there's no way for parents to protect their kids from the kind of imagery and content that, you know, if they're in this generation, they've already seen.

And so I think we need to help them process and navigate it now. Do you think TikTok is the worst of the social media apps? I think TikTok- Or the most addictive maybe? TikTok is very addictive. I think Instagram and Snapchat are also used really frequently.

I think they all talk about how like TikTok, you go on for 15 minutes and two hours, three hours pass and you don't know what happened to the time. So I think just in terms of the time suck during a time of life where they need to be concentrating on learning and making friends. And there's so much that needs to happen to the brain and preparation for life during teenage years.

The time-suck is really dangerous, but then you also have the 24-7 comparison culture, which is really devastating for teenagers, where whether it's body or college or popularity, FOMO, everybody's just constantly comparing themselves to not just the kids they know or the kids in their school, but everyone in the world and some who are not even real. What do you think of the moral panic argument?

And you see that out there where people say, oh, there's always people have always been afraid that we're, the kids aren't okay and something's happening with the kids and whether it's TV or video games and it ends up being this moral panic and then we work it out. Well, I guess I kind of agree with the moral panic and that we have something very dangerous

and we see it empirically with the numbers. Like in my show, I was shocked by, like when I did my pre-interviews, I didn't talk to them about suicide or suicidal ideation at all. And by the time we finished, I think a fourth of the group talked about having tried committing suicide or having suicidal thoughts. Eating disorders was also like that when I did my film about eating disorders in 2007. One in seven girls had an eating disorder or disordered eating. When we did this one girl said to me in the beginning, half my friends have an eating disorder from TikTok, and the other half are lying. So like the triggers are just so ubiquitous,

and the issues are so common. And that lines up with also the research by people like Jonathan Haidt by academics. So, and it even lines up with the social media company's own research. So I think there's no question about that. I think the good news is, like you said, the kids are so smart. They're so aware.

They give us a roadmap for how to fix it, actually. Like you said, awareness doesn't make you invulnerable to it. I think that's what is powerful in the show is we hear from the horse's mouth, like we hear them saying, deconstructing what's happening to them, but you also witness it in real time, like them going through the problems. So they're both experts and subjects in a really strange way and an interesting way. But I think it's like a call out to the adult culture, like we need you to do something about this because blaming young people,

it's kind of like blaming the addict for an opiate addiction. Well, and you mentioned the adult culture and we're all addicted too. I mean, I do an entire show, this show about social media addiction and I am the most online. And I know I've read all the research, I talked to all these experts,

talked to Jonathan, talked to everyone, and it's just, it's really hard. Is that partly why you think parents have had such a tough time dealing with this issue with their kids? Or what has been the challenge for parents to actually know this is going on and deal with it? Honestly, I've been really surprised by parents who are so scared to find out what's going on

in their kid's life. Like Sydney's mom says it. She's like, when Sydney's doing all these really provocative videos, Sydney's mom is like, I don't know if I wanna know what's on her TikTok. I feel like some parents are afraid to watch the show for the same reason.

And it's really important. And it's really important. And it's really important for your kids because I've had so many teenagers and 20-somethings say, my mom or my dad didn't know what was going on with my life until we watched the show together. And I'm so happy they do. It's like a huge burden to have this whole life that you can't really explain to your parents and that's making you feel like all kinds of ways and even though sometimes it's hard to get it out of kids I find like when they know you know they want to have those conversations. I learned so much about my own kids and I think that it's a huge

relief like I showed it up in San Francisco to a big tech audience and much about my own kids. And I think that it's a huge relief. Like I showed it up in San Francisco to a big tech audience and there was a tech reporter from the Washington Post who I saw afterwards with his 23-year-old daughter. He said, we just showed episode one. He said, we're going home, we're going to watch the rest. Should we watch them together? I said, yeah, except maybe episode four, the sex episode you might want to watch apart.

And his daughter had heard me talking about some of what was in it in the Q&A. And she said, no, I heard you talk about the BDSM trend among teenagers. I want my dad to see this because I went through it. It was terrible. And I want him to know about it. And his eyes were just like bugging out of his head. Also, what a mature thing to say and brave to say that you want to watch that with your dad. Yeah, I mean when I first showed it to Sydney, because I showed it to most of the kids like one-on-one

before it came out if they were around and able. And so with Sydney, we watched it together and she said she called her mom and her mom was like, how do I look? I remember not wearing makeup. And she's like, mom, it's about body image. So funny. None of us are immune. That's the whole, you know. But I hope even adults without kids, I think there's something for them too, because young people are so transparent about a lot of the pressures that we all feel. And so I think, you know, like you said, the parents are also posting maybe on Facebook instead of Instagram, but they're also posting themselves, their kids, their best lives.

Yeah. In the last few years, a lot of schools and cities, including right here in LA, have started just taking action and banning phones in the classroom. Have you gotten a sense of the reaction to that move from kids and parents and educators? Yeah. I would say it's not in the last few years, because it wasn't happening when we were filming, which was 21, 22.

But starting this fall, it started happening. It it's been great. Like Cooper, who's in the show said, she went to Brentwood school and she said, now they don't allow phones. And her youngest sister was in a panic about that when it first happened. And she said, now her little sister loves it.

And that's what happened in our group discussions. Like at first it's like, wait, I don't have my phone. But then they really loved it and they talked about that. And I think when everybody doesn't have it, it creates new ways of communicating. And actually what they said at the end, they brought up this, they said, we all wanna be our phones.

It's so great to talk to each other. But they brought up the new existential question, do you exist if you're not on social media? They were like, no, people forget about you. That's the catch-22 is if you're the only one off of it, it is too punitive because it takes you outside of social life, which is hard for a teenager. But if it's a whole friend group or a whole school or the whole city says, we're not going to have them at school, that's great. And I think even for home, parents,

hopefully when they see the show, will realize that they need to monitor their kids more. I mean, once I got into it, I started demanding that my son show me his hour summary every week. Like, he wouldn't screen record like the kids do on the phone, he wouldn't share the details. Like, that was his private life he felt like, which it's not, I'm not saying it was like the best

in my house, I think you do need to know what's going on. But at least I could see the hours and we could have conversations about that. And he agreed with me, like, you know, that when it got out of hand. Yeah, I mean, to your point about how we can't just get rid of it, right? It's here, this is how kids connect.

But having moments, hours of the day, spaces where kids are just talking to each other, a real, forget about just kids, all of us, right? Like, there's just having moments where there is no phone, there is no distraction, and people are just interacting face to face. It sounds so simple, but I do think just carving out some of that time to do that would be a huge difference. It's so important. I mean, I think in the TikTok research that got leaked,

one of the people who worked at TikTok said that the thing about it is it's so addictive that it stops kids from eating, sleeping, moving around the room and making eye contact with each other. It's horrible. It's horrible. And one of the, you know, you asked about after the pandemic. The other side of it, besides using it more, was the increase in social anxiety

to the point where even though parents were really excited for kids to go back to school, a lot of kids were nervous about going back to school. And like you see in the show, Ivy ends up leaving school and doing homeschool because she had so much anxiety. And at Pali, one of the schools where we filmed, one girl said to me that the Wi-Fi is spotty at school,

but she'll walk down the hallway looking at her phone, even if she doesn't have connection. So she doesn't have to make eye contact with other kids. Oh boy. What do you hope people take away? What's the one thing you hope people take away from this? I hope they take away empathy for what teenagers are going through.

I think there's a tendency to like blame, oh, this generation, like they're just on too much. I hope they gain understanding. I think that's really important Oh, this generation, like they're just on too much. I hope they gain understanding. I think that's really important that they actually take the time to see what's going on. And then I think there are a lot of things that we can do. I think we can ask for more safer spaces from the tech companies.

I used to think government regulation would be good, but now it's so politicized. I think that, yeah, taking time off phones, not having it in schools, having spaces to discuss what's going on, and I think watching the show together, talking to your kids about what's going on is really important. Well, it's fantastic. I will be watching all the rest of the episodes, hopefully with my wife.

And Lauren Greenfield, thank you so much. Social studies, everyone go check it out. It's on Hulu and FX. And thanks for stopping by. Thanks so much. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, email us at offline at crooked.com. And if you're as opinionated as we are,

please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. For ad-free episodes of Offline in Podsave America, exclusive content and more, join our friends at the pod subscription community at crooked.com slash friends. And if you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel. Don't forget to follow Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and the other ones for original content, And if you like watching your podcast subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel.

Don't forget to follow Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok, and the other ones for original content, community events, and more. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illich-Frank. The show is mixed and sound edited by Dan Farrell. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Siglund. Dillon Villanueva produces our videos each week.

Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeleine Herringer, and Adrian Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.