Offline with Jon Favreau - Where We Go From Here

Episode Date: November 10, 2024

Yeah, rough week. Jon and Max reckon with Tuesday’s result and break down how Donald Trump — once again — was able to grow his coalition. They dissect how Trump won despite his very online campaign, not because of it — and why that may be cause for hope. Then they share their own experience knocking doors in swing states, talk about the role misinformation and foreign interference played in the election, and return to Offline’s most important question: How can we make democracy work in our current information environment? Plus, Max offers up what may be the only fun question about the next four years. How long will it be before Donald Trump publicly and nationally humiliates Elon Musk? For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.      

There's one big regret I have from the first Trump term. I feel like I did. It was in a different lane. It was in journalism. It is the amount of time that I spent in the aggregate over four years spiraling, angry, despairing. That's four years of my life. If that's an hour a day that I spent spinning myself up, that adds up to a lot of time. There's this quote by Joan Didion, the writer, where an interviewer was asking her once, they were like, you know, Didion, you have a lot of like weird habits. You use the fancy silver every single day. Why is that? And she had this great line where she said, every day is all there is. The next four years, those are four years of your life that you're never going to get to live again. And show up, do the work. There's a lot that we can do that's going to make a big difference.

But don't let this be four years of your life that you lost. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. Max, how are you feeling? It's been a rough week. It's been a rough week. Same here. We obviously talked about the election on Pod Save America this week. Thought you and I could do an offline version of the recap. Yeah.

Namely, the role of the internet and social media and the outcome in politics going forward and sort of the general state of our information and media ecosystem. Right. We should also talk about our new tech oligarch, Elon Musk. But first, we've also spent a lot of time on this show talking about the relationship between screens and our mental health and well-being. And this week, maybe even this year, has made it especially difficult to tear ourselves away from our screens. So let's start with the vibes. You and I both watched the results trickle in on Tuesday night here in the office

with most of the rest of the staff. We are recording this on Friday. We've now had a couple days to process the results. How are you feeling today compared to how you were feeling Tuesday night, Wednesday morning? I mean, in my head, there is so much to process that is so bad and so scary about what's to come. But I will be honest that kind of in my body, I am feeling not as bad as I was when the results came in. There's something about watching the results came in that made me feel really powerless and scared. And, you know, I woke up on Wednesday

morning and I got to work. And there's something about giving yourself something to do, even if it's something small, that I think is really helpful. I feel like we have learned a lot in the last eight years about what we can actually do and can't do that is making me feel more equipped to know kind of what my role is. And I'm just being a lot more ruthless myself about demarcating the amount of space in my own head that I want to give over to this in 2016 we all we took all of it on at once we woke up and then we experienced the entire Trump presidency that morning and we thought through every bad thing that he was going to do and just spent four years traumatizing ourselves imagining the things he was going to do and living through them. And this time, being thoughtful about what we're going to do, what our role is, what

the work that we have to do is, but also being really aggressive with myself, honestly, about carving out time. On Tuesday night, I took half an hour to just listen to music. And it felt stupid to do that because what's happening around us, but it really helped. It really made a difference. The first thing I did when I woke up Wednesday morning is I texted a friend to make plans to have drinks. And I am really, really glad that I did that. I'm really glad that I'm taking space out to just continue to live my life through this. I know. I'm really looking forward to just hanging out with people. Yeah. It's really important to do.

And I know that even the hangouts will be discussions about what happened. Right. But that's okay. Right. It's still better to do it with people. There's a lot of value in community. Julia, like a lot of women, has been in a pretty dark place in the last few days. And she was at the drugstore a couple days ago.

And she ran into a friend of ours, Jamie Loftus, who's been on the show. And they ended up spending a couple hours hanging out. And I cannot tell you how much better she felt. Not because her conception of where the country was going and what this means had changed, but it is so easy to shut yourself inside all of the dread and the despair and the panic. And we really need each other in this moment. And we really need a sense of community and pulling each other through it. And that doesn't mean we're giving up, doesn't mean we're turning it off, but making that decision to make time for community and friends is really important. So I feel okay. I'll talk about two reasons. One is personal.

The other is just sort of what happened with the results. Yeah. The personal one is, like, I've been an anxious person since I was, I was a child. I've just dealt with anxiety most of my life. And it peaked during the pandemic,

which I think I've talked about here. Yeah. And then after that i finally like started going to therapy for the first time and you mean the podcast right the podcast right yeah and so i've been like thinking about anxiety and worry and like spinning out now for the last several years and doing a lot of work thinking about it. And I have come to the conclusion, which is very unlike me, at least how I've traditionally been, that like worrying about the future, which is the essence of anxiety and like dooming about the future, it's just not useful right for me right it's not good for me it does it's i don't find it

productive and it's not to say that there isn't reason to doom sure not trying to say that of course i'm just saying that for me thinking about bad things that might happen and all and and then letting myself go from one bad thing to another to another and getting into this deep, dark place is just, I realize like it's not doing anything. Right. All you're doing is you are forcing yourself to live through the bad things twice. Right. The first time when you imagine it and then the second time when it actually happens,

which is not productive. And it is like about sort of living in the present more. And by that, I mean, okay, what do I do now? What can we respond to? How do we fix this? Like, it's like, you can be more solutions oriented and it doesn't mean like living without the discomfort of what happened. It just means like not letting it control you and trying to get through it with more productive means. So like even going into this, I just – I felt different than I did in 2016 and even 2020. Now, on the results themselves, I deep in my heart thought that it was basically a 50-50 election.

Sure. By the end, I let myself believe, I think she might have a little edge, but I still was so prepared for him to win. Right. We did a whole show about it. More so than I was in 20, and obviously more so than in 2016, right?

So it wasn't like it was shocking. I also think if it had been closer, if we were sitting here today, and Donald Trump won because of like 2,000 votes in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or something like that, I would be really – Second-guessing everything. Yeah, or just like, what the fuck? We did not – this is not what people wanted and we just get – know, like, the fact that the shift towards Trump was uniform, that it happened across almost all demographic groups. Shout out to college educated women.

Shout out to millennials. What do we say? What do we say? The best generation. But anyway, even the people that Kamala Harris won, the shift right was everywhere. Among every demographic group, every region of the country, every state, rural, urban, suburban, everywhere. And I think that allows us to look at the results and say, okay, a lot of people who did not vote for Donald Trump before voted for him. And people who voted for

Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Barack Obama, they voted for Donald Trump. These are not the people showing up at the Trump rallies. These are not the hardcore MAGA people. A lot of people in this country of all races, of every age, gender, geography, they decided to vote for Trump. And we have to now decide why that is, what's going on there, and how to win them back. Right. And like, easier said than done. Yeah. But to me, like that is the, of all the things we don't know yet, which is quite a bit. Right.

That I know, that I feel confident about, that's what we need to do. And so. It's helpful to have that clarity of both of what happened and what the mission is for the next four years. Yeah. I agree. You had a great point in our production meeting on Tuesday

talking about sort of taking this new reality one day at a time and learning to live through what you called a multi-year emergency. It's almost now like a decade emergency. Yes. Can you talk a bit about how you think people can learn to live in this new reality? So I had a conversation with a friend of mine who, she's our age, she's a journalist, she's from Argentina. And Argentina, like ours, is a wealthy

democracy that lived through a horrible right-wing dictatorship in the late 70s and the 80s. And she was talking about advice that she got from her mom who lived through that. And her mom told her, Antonia, you have to stay fabulous. And let me explain what I mean by like, kind of back into it. So it is going to feel for the next four years like your house is on fire. And in many ways, that's true. And what does it feel like when your house is on fire? You feel flushed with adrenaline. It's fight or flight.

You have to run out of the house. But the thing is that feeling is only sustainable physiologically for a few minutes or psychologically. It's not sustainable. You cannot stay at that level for four years. There's always going to be something happening over the next four years. There are things happening fucking today, it's not even present yet, that make it feel like your house is on fire. And like you're saying, I'm not saying to shut it out. I'm not saying to retreat into yourself or to give up, which I know some people are already doing. There's meaningful work to be done no matter how bad it looks like it's going to get. But what I take you have to stay fabulous is meaning as

you have to continue living your life, not just in a sense of like eking it out day to day or spiraling and trying to get through it. You have to turn off the horrors inside your own head, not just on your screen, inside your own head and to find joy in life. There's one big regret I have from the first Trump term. I feel like I did. It was in a different lane. It was in journalism. It is the amount of time that I spent in the aggregate over four years spiraling, angry, despairing. That's four years of my life. If that's an hour a day that I spent spinning myself up, that adds up to a lot of time. There's this quote by Joan Didion, the writer, where an interviewer was asking her once, they were like, you know, Didion, you have a lot of like weird

habits. Like you use the fancy silver every single day. Why is that? And she had this great line where she said, every day is all there is. The next four years, those are four years of your life that you're never going to get to live again. And show up, do the work. There's a lot that we can do that's going to make a big difference. But don't let this be four years of your life that you lost. Yeah. And I think that's such good advice. And I think one way to help get through that is, and we've talked about before, be intentional about your phone and how you're using your phone and your screens. And in terms of news consumption too, like, you know, there's

some people right now who say, I got to check out. I got to check out. No more news for a while. That's understandable for a while. Totally. I think should you want to dip your toe back into the news, dip your toes back into the news, which I hope you all do because I think that's necessary. It's important. I do think that this time around, like, be intentional about your news sources and read below the headlines and the tweets. I think we cannot take everything to an 11 all the time. Yeah. There's going to be a lot of like screaming headlines about something bad that Trump has done and there'll be bad things that Trump do.

Yeah. That does. Right. And there'll be some, some really bad things maybe, But not everything in the first term that we were told is like the end of everything was. And I think my regret is like, I probably could have figured that out by like reading down to the 15th paragraph in the story or like really thinking about what they're, you know, and it's like separating the really bad from, you know, just the headline that is seems scary. I think it's going to be important.

I think that's true. I think that it's important to, and I know I've said this a few times, but we learned last time that we are not powerless. There's a lot that we did with organizing and protesting that slowed him down. I think we're going to talk about like what happened in this election. And I think there's a lot of reason to believe that it is going to be very possible to organize a big swing back in the midterms and God willing, that will put a check on him. And even if the worst case comes to pass, and I'm not saying that it will, because I think you're right. I think there's a lot of reason to think that, you know, he's much more incompetent

than he was eight years ago. Even if the worst comes to pass, like I have reported from and in the countries that are the worst case, you know, if Trump delivered on all of his promises, if he actually executed competently the anti-democratic agenda that he intends to, or that he has promised to.

Even in those places, life goes on. And there is a way to continue living for most people, most of the time, a perfectly happy life, even if the truly terrible things do happen. You know, you still get married, you have kids. And then there's places that have come out of it too. Poland came out of it. You don't just go in, you can come out. You can come out. The hope is never truly fully lost. And it's a sliding scale everywhere, right? It's not like a light switch. That's right. Yes. Which is another reason to stay vigilant and stay involved. Right. It's not over. There's a lot of different ways to

talk about the role that the internet played in this campaign, but I want to start with a bigger picture question I've been wrestling with since we started this show. Fairly clear that people all over the world are rejecting incumbent governments and responding to authoritarian appeals in numbers we haven't seen in our lifetimes. Plenty of factors, economic inequality, mass migration, ethnic and religious conflict, cultural and social alienation.

The promise of democracy is that we can solve these challenges by giving people a voice and how they are governed through reasoned, honest debate that leads to compromise and eventually progress. My question is, where is the space for that debate in a multiracial, multiethnic democracy of over 300 million people who no longer share the same information environment? Like if we all, last election,

or in 2016, we talked about our bubbles, right? And our silos. But if now we have, we all have our own personalized, individualized sources of information on our screen, some of which we are choosing, some of which is being chosen for us, like how do we even begin to engage

in the kind of debate that successful democratic governance requires? I mean, I think that, and I know we agree on this, I think in a lot of ways, this will be the big animating puzzle of this show for the next few years, maybe even more so than it was up to this point. I had to laugh when you put this question on the show outline. It's noon and at 9 a.m. this morning, you threw this on the duck and I was like, well, three hours, that's enough time to figure out the answer to this.

I thought that too, but I was like, we got to sort of get at the heart of it here. We have to talk about it. Especially because it's like why I started offline and why you joined, right? This is the heart of it. So in those three hours, I did not come up with an answer to this question. Me neither.

Okay. Just throw it out there for the listeners too. We've got the weekend. Send us your ideas. I would say write into Offline at Crooked Media if you know how to solve for information environments. No, I will. Let me I think a useful first step is to break down what the kind of problem is and how it is playing out as manifest in this election. Inflation, of course, is what seems to have been the biggest single issue driving that secular national shift that you talked about. I'm sure you have seen, many of us have now seen this poll that got conducted right before the election that posed a number of factual questions to people, one of which was, is it true that inflation is back down to normal range and is mostly recovered?

And there were a few other questions like this about crime, about the stock market, about immigration. And the answer, of course, or the responses, of course, were that Democratic-leaning voters overwhelmingly gave the correct answer, which is that in the case of inflation, it is in fact down. And Trump-leaning voters overwhelmingly said that inflation is not back down, which is not correct. And people took that to mean that right-wing voters are being lied to, live in unreality. And I think that you and I agree that that is actually not quite what is happening. No, and it's funny you mentioned that.

I was literally, this is, we can talk about this. Just tweeting about it before I walked into the studio because Michael Tomasky wrote a piece. Oh, I saw this. That's like, it's not the economy, it's the right-wing media information. And Mehdi Hassan jumped in too and was like, come on, you know that on January 20th, most people are going to switch and say the economy is great. I think that is true among Trump partisans. Sure. Right? That is true.

And I think Democratic partisans who pay close attention to the news will say, yeah, of course, inflation's down. Right. But the exit polls, right, which, you know, are still a grain of salt with exit polls. Of course, of course. But they are good for attitudes more than they are splitting up demographic groups for now. Right, right. groups for now. 75% of people, 75 said that they or their family has experienced moderate or severe hardship because of inflation in the last year. And that's not your assessment of the overall economy. That's assessment of you and your life. And where I would blame the information environment there is, okay,

so you've experienced inflation, you experienced hardship from inflation. Now, what is Kamala Harris going to do about it versus what's Donald Trump going to do about it? And the information that people were getting there was clearly faulty, right? So I'm totally willing to talk about the information environment there, but the experience of inflation, I just we cannot wish that away on. We cannot like hand wave that and blame it on media. information environment played in this is where a kind of prevailing like kind of Bernie Sanders argument here is that, you know, the Biden administration trotted out these top line economic indicators and these do not reflect the live experience of a lot of working class families. And I actually want to push back on that because I don't think that that is true. Because what you do see, in fact, is that demographically the people who broke the

most from Trump for Trump are the people who benefited most from the Biden economy they saw their wages go up by the most they saw their household savings go up by the most their employment rate increased by the largest amount clearly they are not crediting the Biden administration with that and I think on some level that is understandable, actually. And I see how people get there not through being lied to by Fox News, because part of the conceit of the Biden economy, the tradeoff of the Biden economy coming out of the pandemic was doing a bunch of fiscal stimulus so that people's incomes, employment, savings will all improve more than inflation. And that did happen, especially for working class families. But here is the thing.

If you got a job that you would not have otherwise gotten in the Biden economy, you're not crediting Joe Biden with that. I got a new job during the Biden administration and there's no part of me that says, well, thank you, Joe Biden, for getting me this job here at Crooked Media,

even though- I think you got this job because of the chips in science. This is an IRA. This is a green job. This is a green job. So I understand why the people who are, you know, you in your mind, you got yourself that job. If you got a raise in your mind, you got yourself that raise. But at the same time, if you go to the grocery store and the price of a basket of groceries is up, I think, 36 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal estimate, of course you're going to put that on the White House. And I think where the information environment –

Well, I will also say, though, that wages have not outpaced inflation in all but five states over the last couple of years. So there is still not consistently enough, right? Like we are getting to the point now where wages are finally starting to outpace inflation, but even like real life experience when people think, well, I'm not making more, but the prices are higher. That is true for a big number of people still. Of course, of course. And it's not quite the people who are coming up for Trump, but there is a lot of overlap for that. But I think where the information environment comes into play is that if you are already inclined to believe that the Democrats or even just Washington generally or just politicians generally are indifferent to you or they're inept or they don't connect with your experience, it's going to be much easier for you to form a narrative in your mind that Washington is responsible for the parts of the economy that are hurting you, which includes inflation and is predominantly inflation, and to not credit them with the parts of the economy

that are helping you. Now, if you're a partisan Democrat, it's much easier for you to tell a story that says, thank you, Joe Biden, for all of these, you know, green jobs that showed up in my neighborhood. And I think that it's not about I watched the podcast I listened to lied to me and I live in an alternate reality. It is about how your information environment constructs a narrative for you out of the things that you experience. And a lot of that is driven by who you identify with. It's driven by political identity and cultural identity. And if Washington and Democrats, the people in power feel distant and Trump feels closer to you and something about him resonates with you, much easier for you to

tell yourself a story that he is or is not responsible for the economic benefits you're feeling based on that. I think that's right. I also think it's useful to divide the electorate into people who consume a lot of news and information. Sure. Democrats and Republicans, Trump voters and Harris voters. Put those people aside for now. Right, right. I mean, those are not the people deciding the election. Those are not the people deciding the election, and those are not the majority of voters. Majority of voters are not super partisan. Sometimes they swing back and forth between parties. Sometimes they swing back and forth between being in the electorate and voting and not.

And they are disproportionately less likely to consume not just political news, but any news. And so for those folks, you have to say, okay, what is the information environment? Just to the extent that they're getting some of it, what is it telling them? And I think in addition to inflation, the anti-incumbent mood also tracks with a loss of trust in major institutions that has been happening since the financial crisis, probably since 9-11, actually, since the Iraq war. And we have been on a steady decline in trust in institutions. And I think you are less likely to trust big institutions like government and business and media if you are economically struggling, if you feel like your community has been overlooked, right? So you are less likely to trust. So that lack of trust, right?

Now, when you throw in social media and the internet, right, which is primed to tell us that to show us all the bad news that the big institutions are at fault for, right? This government's bad because of this. Democrats are bad because of this, but also Republicans are bad because of this. And the media is bad because of this. And everything that bad happens is something far away from you that you're not connected to. And so, and then it makes you feel angrier because that's, we know that's what social media does and it makes you feel more afraid. We know that's what social media does. And so therefore, when a Donald Trump comes along or people like that and are like, fuck the system. Yeah. I'm going to burn it all down.

Right. It's not that people are like, oh, you're awesome. I mean, certainly many, many of his voters are. Right. Some people are like oh you're awesome i mean certainly many many of his voters are right some people are like you know what you're an asshole but at least you're not part of this shit right that brought that brought these bad i think the the my community feels overlooked point is a really really important part of this i've been thinking a lot about the evolution of the narratives that we had in 2016 and the the first weeks after that election, the kind of prevailing narrative was this kind of George Packer argument that a lot of communities were left behind by the Obama recovery and people were struggling and that is why they voted for Trump. And there was truth to that, but we later learned that a lot of the people who voted for Trump were actually

economically doing well in their communities, but they were still feeling that their community was being overlooked in the sense that they felt alienated by social change. They felt that the social mores around me are evolving in ways that I feel leave me out or that I find scary somehow. And then I think that as we talk about inflation and the role of the economy, which clearly is on the top of everybody's mind, I think it's important that we think about the degree to which that is an expression of people feeling, to your point, that institutions aren't listening to me, that the culture and society around me is changing, and that the people in power, I feel like they are allied to someone else. They're allied to someone who's not in my community, which I think is a lot of where these anti-immigrant conspiracies come from. And the, the, everyone keeps talking about the anti-trans

ad that, uh, the Kamala's for they, them, um, that the Trump campaign spent more money on than any other ad, not just in the battlegrounds, but nationally. And it was running everywhere all the time. And I think it is too simplistic to just call it an anti-trans ad because I don't know that that's, I don't think that's why it worked. Right, yes. I think the reason, because if you look at that ad, it is she's spending your tax dollars

to give undocumented immigrants who are in prison uh gender reassignment surgery right forget about the truth over the wire right right but and then it says kamala's for they them right which is like a silly they're going to use the pronouns but even if if you took if you took uh trans issues out of that ad completely, and it was just, Kamala wants to give your tax dollars to undocumented immigrants. Kamala Harris wants to give your tax dollars. She wants criminals who are in jail to have healthcare.

Still would have been effective, I think. Because it's what Republicans have done about Democrats forever. They are not for you. They are for their interest groups. And you, hardworking, and you're not making enough money, and you can't afford stuff, and you're struggling, then they are not for you because they are too focused on their people. Right. And by the way, I think that we are seeing all of this in the debate within the left and

within the Democratic Party over what happened in this election. I mean, I cannot tell you the number of viral takes I have seen that said that. I haven't. I'm glad I'm getting you with them. It's you're familiar with them. It's, you know, she would have won if only she had done X, Y, or Z or if the Biden White House had done X, Y, Z. And every time it's something that they did. And it's something that they poured 100 million dollars of ads into. And it's not that people are stupid or lying. It's this sense that, well, the Democrats lost because they were catering to Liz Cheney. They were catering to somebody else. And if they had only spoken to my side and my people,

then we would have won. And I understand why people reach for that narrative. And I think that it speaks to, again, the way that our information environment tilts us towards seeing things that confirm a narrative that says that we are being neglected,, once again, it's like I'm trying very hard to not just leap onto things that confirm my priors. Of course. Explanations, you know. It's hard though. Which is what we all do in times of stress. It's all hard. I feel like I have medium confidence, medium to high confidence that inflation played a huge role,

an anti-incumbent sentiment played a huge role, and Joe Biden's decision not to step aside earlier played a role. I have pretty good confidence on those things. The rest of it, I am just waiting for data, for good information, to listen to people. I'm just leaving it all open. Yeah. So I'm just waiting for more information. But we don't have a space to have those conversations. Right. In a way that will reach most people in the country. Because our media environment, especially if you are highly politically engaged,

is just absolutely geared towards finding some group to be angry at. It's about pitting us versus them. It's, you know, the bad Democrat. I represent the good Democrats and the bad Democrats took over her campaign and that's why we lost. And I'm seeing this just in like the texts I'm getting from friends, which are like, this is why, this is definitely why she lost. And this is why she lost. And this is the problem with the Democratic party and why you got to criticize the democratic party more it's lost well and i was like look i'm happy happy to criticize the democratic party sure what i'm just trying to avoid is jumping on definitive takes

which yes pundits like to do and journalists who have to write stories anyway like to do and and people who are who are just angry yeah want to do right you want an explanation and i do think that we should resist jumping on to a take especially if it feels very emotionally satisfying yeah and i've been telling some of my friends like that your take could be true sure but you should know that your take is is a product of your information environment and your social network right yeah right which sounds you know sort of antiseptic but like this is what i know it's like you we all watch our own stuff talk to our own people and so you know there's it's funny because a lot of the more college educated like people, like our social network.

Our people. Right? The people who are angry or who are like, she shouldn't have lost and the Democratic Party sucks in our network, they are very much on the like, too much woke, too much woke, too much woke stuff, right? Yeah.

And I actually think that's very possible as an explanation for those kinds of voters. Right. In blue states and voting against possible i don't know for sure but it's possible right but what i was trying to say is like but but there are you know working class voters who probably have no fucking idea about any of these right who didn't have any of these debates about the woke shit right probably don't have any idea yeah and they're just like really pissed that over the last four years,

maybe they thought they were voting for someone who's going to, you know, make their paycheck bigger. And it didn't happen because of inflation. And they didn't bother to figure out why inflation happened or greed tax measures. So then they went to Trump, right? So we just have to be open to the fact that multiple things could be true. And it could be multiple factors that cost it. Let's talk about strategy in the campaign. Donald Trump's media strategy was to ignore most legacy media outlets and only do interviews with right-wing media and podcasts with largely male audiences comedy

podcast sports podcast Joe Rogan um strategy obviously worked or at the very least it didn't hurt um the immediate takes here have been that Kamala Harris should have gone on Rogan or the Democrats need our own Joe Rogan I think those are a bit too simplistic we can talk about that but what do you think I mean I was I was fully persuaded by the case that you all made on PSA that going on Rogan would have been detrimental. On the like, where is our Joe Rogan? I think that the mistake that people are making here is they're saying Joe Rogan pulled people to the right. And Joe Rogan is not a political podcast. It's not Ben Shapiro. He did not found that podcast to say let's get the under 30s to, you know, be anti-woke. He just started a male hot spot. He's an Obama Bernie Sanders supporter.

Right. Who just moved over. Right. And like wanted like universal health care. Right. And like wanted like universal health care. Right. I mean the degree to which he is symptom and driver is complicated. But I think that it is more helpful to look at him as a symptom. Every whiteboard pull of his audience that he is reflecting rather than him being the thing that is turning that audience right wing. I totally agree with that.

Also like she – someone pointed out, you know who the, the, the, uh, Rogan of the left is Howard Stern. Yeah. And she did Howard Stern, right. Different audiences, probably Howard Stern's older, I'm sure, but still more male. Call her daddy. She did. Right. So it's like, and I think, and again, the reason I thought in the end that Kamala Harris wouldn't have done well on Rogan is more about Kamala Harris and how like her interviews. Like, I just don't know that it would have gone as well for her as it did for Trump. Yeah. So, but I do think going on those podcasts in those spaces is important for people to do who may not necessarily agree with what those hosts say. Yeah. But we do, to your point, we have a Joe Rogan to the left. We have a bunch. There's

Howard Stern. There's Oprah. I have Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert. We just don't see them that way because they share our politics. So we say, well, of course, they arrived at that naturally. And people who hold political views different than ours, we say, well, this is part of a political project that is designed to pull people in this direction rather than grappling with the much harder thing, which is that this reflects a huge shift around his audience of under 30 men. Well, right. And I also think that even – and probably Kimmel and Colbert, they have bigger audiences than most of the people you were just talking about. That's true. Like the cable news audience, very small.

It's not, it's not determinative. You are definitely preaching to the choir there. Right. And it's older. Yeah. Like, you know, Crooked Media, we're probably preaching to the choir here, but our audience is younger.

Yeah. By the way, everyone's like, should we know Joe Rogan to the left? It's like, you know what? We are the only left-leaning, Pod Save America is the only left-leaning podcast in the Apple top 10. Is that true, really?

Yes. Wow. And then in the top 20, you get Ezra in there too. Yeah. And then I guess the bulwark right there. Does Conan O'Brien count? I guess he's not really political. I don't think they do.

Yeah, I don't think they do. But you know, we couldn't get, we couldn't get, we can get the ticket on Pod Save America. Not that that would have done anything. Not that that would have win the race. But I'm just saying that I talked to Brian Tyler Cohen, our pal about this on his pod yesterday, that I do think that like democratic politicians have to start seeing sort of the alternate media ecosystem, whether it

is friendly podcasts like ours that are more left-leaning or podcasts that don't necessarily always have to do something with politics, but reach a big audience, right? Like, you know, Call Her Daddy, she did right before the election, but like, you know, you could go on there. If you're going to run in 2028, maybe you sit down with Alex Cooper before then. And maybe you don't wait until two weeks or two months before the election to start thinking about those audiences. But at the same time, I think that we are looking too far down the end of the ecosystem if you're only going on the podcast that already you have to start speaking to these people before they have arrived at a podcast, Twitch stream, whatever it is that speaks to their politics and get to them before those politics are formed, which is what a lot of shows like Joe Rogan do. Yes. And I also think some of the, to the extent there is a sort of left-leaning media ecosystem,

I think democratic politicians sometimes are like, okay, we're only going to put the politicians on the most, most friendly, right? Like we, I mean, I interviewed Kamala Harris when she was running in 2020 and like, it was a friendly interview, but I asked some tough questions. And I think that like, I think if you're, if you're working for a democratic politician, you are a democratic politician, you do have to be comfortable going on a podcast, which is a longer form conversation. It's not like you're, because we have some politicians on Positive America who treat it like a cable hit, you know? And then we, well, then we sort of get into it too. And you're like,

suddenly I'm asking five questions that are like, you know, I'm watching someone on TV and I'm like, so what's your plan? And blah, blah, blah. And that's it. And then there's the politicians who come into the studio and we sit down for like 45 minutes. And that just gives you more time to really have an interesting conversation. But you have to be willing, if you're the politician, to like get off your talking points. To speak in the language of that audience. Speak in the language of that audience and just like shoot the shit like you're a normal person like the microphones were not right and that i think and i'm not saying republican politicians on the whole are very good at this at all they're they're the same a lot of them most of them are the same way um but i do think in this environment if you're trying to reach young men or

whichever demographic group in those spaces where they are not used to hearing politics all the time you have to match that right that tone i mean jd vance is not someone who is popular so i don't want to point to him as a success but as someone who is speaking to those audiences in their language for quite a long time and it produced a lot of very very bad sound bites for him that really dogged him and in a world where we did not have inflation, we would point to that as a huge liability. And I think that it was on net, but it does, to your point, speak to the importance of going to the audiences where they are before they have formed their political views. Yes. Another thing about strategy,

Harris campaign ran a traditional campaign complete with door knocking, phone banking, all the tools and volunteer efforts that help people get to the polls. You and I were part of that in the last weekend. We were in Arizona, saw you in Arizona. We were in Nevada. On the other side, the Trump campaign's canvassing operation was almost non-existent. They relied on Elon Musk's America Pax, cobbled together voter contact operation that was by all accounts accounts not that sophisticated and actually contacting and turning out voters. And yet Trump won. Yeah. One side focused on in-person organizing.

The other side was criticized by us and most people as too online. So is the lesson that the Internet is real life? What do you think? A really big soapbox that I have been on the last few days, and I'm really going to be on the next couple of weeks as people process lessons in this, you were already seeing takes from people saying that like Trump understood the electorate, Hamlet did not understand the electorate. The Trump campaign was a liability for them. If you look at the numbers, like you mentioned, there was a nationwide, a seven point move towards Republicans across states, across demographics, but in the states where they both campaign, that was cut down to at best a three point swing

towards Republican or a one point swing, which is another way of saying that when people heard from these campaigns, when they were targeted by the Trump campaign, they became significantly less likely to vote for him by a change against the secular trend of between four and six points, which is huge. Harris campaign made a massive difference. And there is no indication that the Trump campaign persuaded anybody of anything appears to have turned people people off and that is a really it's a it's hard to hold in your head he had one and a huge blowout and his campaign hurt him I understand it's very hard to hold those two things together but that is what the numbers show us and I think it is really important that we keep that in mind both when we think about what works in campaigning and also we think about

what resonated with people in this election. Well, it's funny because my analysis of the campaign in maybe the last two weeks when she was closing strong and he wasn't was not like, oh, she's going to win now. It's like he may still win, but I don't think anything he's doing is helping. And I still believe that. Absolutely. I think the data really bears that out.

Yeah. I don't think anything. Yes. And I'm not saying that campaign did not do a lot of smart things. Sure. Like I think the media strategy around podcasts was probably pretty smart. I think their ad strategy, clearly effective. Yes.

But there's no evidence the ground game was effective. And there is evidence that her ground game was effective. And when you look at the global context, it's even starker. There was every incumbent government. I think this is right. I think it's every incumbent government that faced reelection this year suffered a massive swing against them. It was I think in Latin America, there have been 20 elections in a row where the incumbent lost power across Latin America, which is crazy. And in context with that, the Democrats significantly outperformed the global trend in terms of the anti-incumbent swing that they experienced. Now, it is a distinction without a

difference. In the end, they still lost power, as you may have heard. I understand this is cold comfort. But when we think about what does the electorate want, what appealed to them, and what worked on misinformation for interference right uh we've talked a lot about how we've never really dealt with that problem yeah um i'm curious what role you think misinformation played in this election my sense is um much it was much less determinative i agree um even as we talked about how fucked up the information environment overall is, I think that is different than misinformation. I agree. But what do you think?

Was there any like campaign or specific piece of misinformation that you think was a big deal here? Well, peanut the squirrel, I think we can agree, really, really swung this one. And if you listening don't know, in the final days, the Trump folks were doing it for the squirrel. There was a squirrel that was killed by New York State.

There was an OnlyFans model involved. Yeah, there was an OnlyFans model who had a pet squirrel that he used in his OnlyFans videos, I guess. And then the authorities find out that he shouldn't have had it and they killed it, which doesn't seem like the right thing to do at all.

But somehow this was the fault of, somehow this was like the Democrats' fault, I guess. I don't, I truly don't understand, but Elon Musk was all over it. The squirrel bit people. Oh, rabies protocol. Put it down for rabies protocol. There we go.

You guys should really have microphones. I really believe that. It's moments like this that we need to hear from you. Okay, the squirrel was put down because the squirrel bit someone, was biting people. It bit an animal patrol officer. The squirrel bit an animal patrol officer. Emma and Austin are filling us in on what actually happened with the squirrel.

They are. So you know what? The squirrel fucking deserved it, apparently. I'm a law and order voter, but just for squirrels in blue states. No, I think that I don't think that misinformation played a demonstrable role in this election at all. I mean, we kind of talked about like people's understanding of his inflation down, his undocumented immigration up. Their views on that were factually incorrect if they voted for Trump, which as most people did. But I don't think that that's misinformation. I just think it's about how you experience those changes.

Right. Maybe a lack of good information, maybe not getting enough information. There's a lot of different ways here. But I think when we think misinformation, it's like the lies put out by Trump. They travel. Yeah, right. The foreign interference, I think, mostly failed. Even though it was unbelievably fucked up that Russia was like calling in bomb threats.

Across every swing state. Yeah. So on the one hand, on the other, patented take on this. The good news is that our safeguards on this are better. The safeguards from the intelligence community and federal agencies know how to look out for this better. I think that, in my opinion, the media did a better job of not running with stuff irresponsibly. We're not doing another John Podesta leaks again. None of it was that effective. But I think what is scary to me about the Russian

interference, which did not play any demonstrable role in this election, polling places were only closed very briefly. There's no indication that it swung the vote any meaningful degree is the degree to which we have just accepted that this is how our politics work now is that when a Republican is running for president, hostile foreign powers are going to directly and overtly and kind of violently interfere in the conduct of our election to get that Republican elected to office. And we're all just going to say, well, that's just how it goes. Unless you're around and then you're working on the other side. That is true. That is absolutely correct.

But it is, yeah, it's wild. And it is. I really worry about where Trump will take that because it's every time it happens, it goes a little bit further. We get a little bit more inured to it. We get a little bit more used to it and he gets more open and more brazen and more shameless about it. And that's scary. I will say, you know, it took some time, but after 2016, I think we all, a lot of us came to the realization that yes, Russia was interfering, but they're pushing on an open door. Exactly. And it is the divisions in our own society that make it possible to exploit,

for foreign actors to exploit. And I think that is the same, to the extent that foreign actors exploited those divisions this time around, it's the divisions that are the heart of the problem. That is right. That is the real problem. That is the symptom.

I think that's absolutely true of 2016. The bomb threat's less now. So I am trying to be really vigilant with myself and not spinning myself up over things that have not happened yet, both from my own mental well-being and to your point last time around, we got really panicked about a lot of things that did not happen. So I will say to try to be measured about it, I'm trying to keep a watchful eye on the degree to which Trump invites or solicits more overt foreign intervention in our politics going forward, knowing that he now is going to be

able to prevent any sort of a organized government response to it. The other thing I worry about is I don't think conspiracies, election conspiracies, immigration conspiracies, deep state stuff did anything to swing our politics this time around. I think it's why people came out to vote for Trump but I do worry about Trump using those much more so than he did last time around to

buy acquiescence among his people especially within the government to do some really fucked up stuff in terms of like mass purging civil servants doing some really terrible things with regulations, election interference. So I think that is kind of the role of misinformation that I'm going to have my eye

on going forward. I too will have my eye on that. I'll have my other eye on our new tech oligarch, Elon Musk. So, big winner. Big winner, Elon Musk. Yeah. He, you know, his investment in the Trump campaign is like reportedly north of $100 million. Plus the social media platform he owns that just pumped out tons of pro-Trump content. And, of course, he was a valuable surrogate on the trail.

This will pay off. He didn't like the jumps. Musk and his companies are expected to benefit now in government contracts, regulatory changes, possibly an appointment for Musk himself in a second Trump administration. His net worth has already increased by $15 billion. Good for Elon. No one better.

No one deserves it more. He apparently joined Trump's call with Zelensky today. That was disturbing. What do you think? Has Elon outsmarted us all? So before we get to the bad stuff, this silver lining here is that a lot of this was a handshake deal that Trump made with Musk, where Musk gives him the largest in-kind political contribution in the history of politics in terms of the campaign that he ran for him. And then in exchange, he is going to get this role in the Trump White House, which we'll talk about. Now, if there's one thing that we know about Trump and his deals that he makes, it's that he loves to renege on them. It's been a hallmark of his businesses from the beginning. He stiffs contractors, he makes a deal, and he doesn't follow through. So you can look

forward to the satisfaction of him stiffing Musk very publicly. And if there's another thing we know, it's that he loves to feud with and ultimately expel people from his inner circle, especially if they have too much power or if they're getting too much attention. So I do feel confident we can look forward to Trump publicly and nationally humiliating Elon Musk. And I am excited for that. It's going to be fun. The bad news is that the thing that Musk has ostensibly negotiated for is to be Trump's like regulations czar or regulation cutter in chief. And we know an audit of the federal government, according to an audit of the federal government. We know that what that actually means, because Musk has said as much as it means a mass purge of civil servants and agencies like the EPA. And here's a fun one, the Federal Aviation

Administration. I know you've talked about this before and it's really scaring me. Like I said, I try not to do about the future. The FAA thing, since the first time you said it, it's sort of been lodged in my head. I will say it's not air traffic controllers, at least. It's not. But it's about agencies that regulate his businesses specifically. And this is, I mean, to go like a little Ben Rhodes on you, this is just absolutely like page number three in the strongman authoritarian, elected authoritarian playbook, which is that you bring in your cronies and you just strip the government for parts in terms of massive contracts, which Musk already has before

a bunch of different federal agencies, payouts in the form of tax cuts, which means that we are just going to be, the federal government is just going to be giving our money to Elon Musk. That's what it's going to be doing. It's just transferring our tax dollars to him. There are 20 ongoing federal regulatory investigations into Musk's businesses. I'm sure those will be swept up in his regulatory audit. And the side effect of that, even though it's not the intention, is going to be less regulation and therefore a less safe environment for the rest of us. Yes. I do think I'll give a silver lining on all of that. I think it provides us a roadmap for an argument against Trump and Musk that fits with some of the trends

that we've been talking about, which is, okay, these people are in power. They control Washington. And this is how much Elon Musk made today. How much did you make? Right. The handouts to billionaires are going to be very weird. Jared Kushner just got another deal

in fucking Saudi Arabia. Right. Did the price of eggs go down for you? Yeah. And don't you want people in government who are going to do that for you? Who are going to like actually fight for you and not just say it

and then go in there and get themselves richer? Right. Like I think that that is probably a pretty effective message for a lot of folks. Right. I'm willing to, again, I'm willing to be proven wrong about this, but I think it is fertile territory.

I agree. And Trump's mandate, popular mandate this time, is very different from his mandate in 2016. His mandate in 2016 was, I am angry about social change, immigration, diversity. And Trump is going to put a stop to that in the form of just being really horrible to minorities and marginal groups. And he was in a good position to deliver on that promise. But if he was elected on an economic mandate, especially for working class voters there, he is going to do the opposite of delivering that on day one. Yes. Uh, and the, and the question is, can we, um, make people understand that?

Yeah. Help people understand that. Um, I want to quickly finish with just a note on what a second Trump term may mean for the media ecosystem and journalism at large. We saw a resurgence in traditional news media after 2016. People subscribed, supported newspapers as a check on Trump, fourth estate, yada, yada. Eight years later, you know, we have a lot of anger towards your old friends at the new york times sane washing donald trump uh and massive subscriber loss that we just talked about the other week at the washington post because of bezos um do you think we will again see a resurgence in support of the news media like what how do you see the future of the traditional

legacy media yeah i i think that we are unlikely to get what we got in 2016 and 2017, which is that people were I know we talked about this last week. People were kind of grasping for someone who is going to fight for them against this very scary authoritarian coming in. And the media implicitly kind of promised to be that and promised to be the resistance. And Trump helped that along by identifying the media as the resistance. I don't think people are primed for that this time around. I think a lot of that is exhaustion. I think a lot of it is a sense that the media promised to implicitly to protect us from Trump and now he's back. So how can I go give another, make another bunch of newspaper subscriptions to stop Trump? There are also a lot of other cross pressures on the media right now that have only been growing.

Bezos' preemptive surrender to Trump, maybe that's what he meant to do by pulling the newspaper's endorsement. Maybe he didn't mean to, but Trump just took it that way. He certainly gave a very lavish congratulation to Trump coming into office, which is pretty scary to see from the owner of the third largest newspaper in the country. It's a leading indicator. owners of media companies for allowing free reporting on him, which means that, you know, for a long time, owning a news, a major news operation meant losses of a few million dollars a year if you owned a big cable news operation, if you owned a newspaper. And now maybe it means losses of billions of dollars a year in the form of punishing regulations from Trump. I think the reader revolt is probably going to continue. The New York Times did see a big boost

in subscriptions, but it's not a good thing if there's only one viable newspaper out there in the world. decline in demand for the kind of core journalistic value propositions of accountability and shared reality and accurate information. And there's still a market for that people. There's still people out there who want that, but this is going to feel to a lot of people like a big signal from the country that it's like, we don't really care about those things and we're not really interested in them. Yeah. No, I worry about that too. Because people, you can see people saying like, well, we, you know, he didn't do any interviews with traditional media

and they, look, I mean, you can quibble with the Times and the Post, whatever else. Sure. Plenty of pieces we can point to

where they were very clear about what Donald Trump's intentions are for a second term. Yes. The Times did a long series on it and maybe, where they were very clear about what Donald Trump's intentions are for a second term. The Times did a long series on it. And maybe not all of their headlines were written to everyone's satisfaction. But the reporting was there.

And it was there in the Post as well, despite being owned by Jeff Bezos. There in the Wall Street Journal, which the editorial board is right-leaning. It was a lot of places. And obviously, that reporting is incredibly important just to give us all an accurate record of what's happening in the country. But yeah, I have that same concern. What do you think we should be doing here at Crooked? So, I was talking to Tommy before the recording about this, like how do you reach that 7% that swung for Trump? And I also do not have an answer for this.

The thing that my mind keeps going back to is actually a very different group. I keep, you mentioned like this last weekend, we all went to Arizona, do a lot of door knocking. My mind keeps going back to conversations that I had with Democrats, with registered Democrats

and with independents or Republicans who were voting Democratic in this neighborhood outside of Phoenix called Queen Creek. Do you know this place? It's a very, I did not know about it beforehand

even though I grew up in Phoenix. It's, I mean, it's a brand new- You grew up in Phoenix? In Scottsdale, yeah. Very Trumpy, you know, overwhelmingly went for Trump,

but like 60%, so there's a lot of Democrats there and it's very deep MAGA. You see a lot of Trump flags, a lot of giant pickup trucks with Punisher flags on them. You see a lot of off-duty cop cars parked next to the pickup truck with the Trump logo on them.

And you have your little voter list, and you're going to all of the houses that are registered Democrat or willing to vote Democratic. And they don't have any yard signs out front. There's no Kamala signs in those Democratic. And they don't have any yard signs out front. There's no Kamala signs in this neighborhood. So you knock on the door and the relief on people's faces when they heard, you know,

I'm a volunteer with the Kamala Harris campaign because they didn't know that people knew that they were there. Do you know what I mean? They think, and they would say this, they would say, we really feel isolated out here and we're afraid of our neighbors. We are really afraid to put a sign out because we're afraid of what our neighbor is going to do to us. We heard stories about, you know, people getting attacked in front of their houses after 2020 by their own neighbors because their neighbors had heard that they had voted for Joe Biden. And there's one woman who talked to Julia

who said, I want to vote for Kamala Harris because I'm really worried about an abortion ban. neighbors had heard that they had voted for Joe Biden. And this one woman who talked to Julia, who said, I want to vote for Kamala Harris because I'm really worried about an abortion ban, but I don't care what you say to me. I am terrified my neighbors are going to find out that I voted for her somehow because Trump will tell them or something and that they're going to come to get me. And being able to talk to these people did not swing the election. It did not change the outcome of it. But hearing how relieved they were and how much better they felt to know that we were there, that there was something larger than them who saw them, who recognized them. And to hear that there were other Democrats in their neighborhood, in their community said, you know, I really feel like no matter what happens, I feel better about getting through it because I know that we are not in alone. And I think that there is a really big value for Crooked Media. Of course, part of it is going to be figuring out how we as a party reach

those other 7%. I think there's a lot of value in reaching the people who are feeling scared and hopeless right now and helping, I'm going to say them, helping all of us because I'm one of those people to get through the next four years. Yeah, I think that's right. And I also think there is just a role to play in, and we've been trying to do this, but having conversations that are nuanced, that don't necessarily fit with all of your views, but maybe fit with some, where you hear from someone you disagree with, you disagree, you debate, but it's respectful. You have an interesting conversation. And like, I just think that's how, that's how we're going to change things. Um, I keep thinking about, uh, we knocked on a lot of doors in this very working class, um, neighborhood in East Las Vegas and a lot of Latino residents, Asian American residents,

just very diverse. And, you know, some of the, some of the streets that we went on were like really run down. Some were just, you know, traditional working class neighborhoods, but it just made, as we're like at the height of the campaign where all the information is coming in and we're all like, do you see the seltzer pole and this and Madison Square Garden rally and that? We're doing this. And then you knock on doors and people are, first of all, they open the doors. They are friendly. Yeah.

They are smiling. And they're like, what's going on? Like, so disconnected from everything that we talk about. And there's this one 73-year-old Asian-American woman. She comes to the door and she speaks broken English. She has a big dog who's barking the whole time. And she's trying to talk to us. It's hard to sort of understand her.

But we're like, we're here from, are you going to vote on Tuesday? And she's like, vote, vote. We're like, vote on Tuesday in the election. She goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She goes, Trump? President Trump? And we're like, no, no, no, no, vote. We're like, vote on Tuesday in the election. She goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she goes, Trump? President Trump? And we're like, no, no, no, no, no. We held up our door knockers and we're like, we showed the picture of Kamala. She's like, oh, Kamala, Kamala. She's like, isn't she the one who let the migrants in who were killing the police? And we're like,'re like no no no no no no no and i'm like look she um she wants to like close the border if she wins and make sure that the people who are here and undocumented

they can get a path to citizenship but if they work and they want to and they put in and she's all well i want people to get a path to you know she's like i just worry about the border i want people here and then and then i was, and also, she will lower the cost of your prescriptions. And Nina Harris, who's in Vote Save America, Nina was like, and your healthcare.

And then Tom, he's behind us, and he's like, and cut your taxes. She will lower your taxes. Which Trump wants to raise. Right. And this woman sort of

looked at us and she goes, okay. She goes, I'll vote for Kamala. And we're like, really? And she's like, and Nina's like, do you need a ride?

do you need anything scheduled Tuesday? she's like no I promise I promise I'll vote for her and I was like you know what

that's great there are the people we can like we can rage here about like oh they're ignorant or misinformation

people are out there and they are willing to be persuaded and they are living busy lives and they are disconnected from all the bullshit that we talk about and care about and instead of judging them for it, I think we should

go out there and try to convince them. And that's like, that is the promise of politics. I think we can do it. Well, there you go. We're going to leave it on that high note for after a tough week. We will be back here next week and every week after that, trying to make sense of it all. week. We will be back here next week and every week after that trying to make sense

of it all. We'll see you all back here soon. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher.

It's produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illich-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Charlotte Landis is our engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Cherlin, and Adrian Hill for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Hey, offline listeners. If you were fans of S-Town, then Brian Reid is back with Question Everything, a new podcast that is questioning everything we think we know about journalism. Brian got sued over S-Town because allegedly it was not journalism.

So he's now on a quest to figure out what journalism is, who gets to be a journalist, how it helps us understand the world or not. You'll hear from the likes of Ira Glass and Ested Herndon, to local news publishers who got sued, and from regular people whose views of the news strained their marriage. You're not alone in questioning the state of journalism media

and how the heck it affects our lives and democracy. So join in. Listen to Question Everything on your favorite podcast app.