Offline with Jon Favreau Crooked Media

Has this pod saved America…from phone addiction?! We got Jon Lovett to take a rather extreme version of the Offline challenge in Fiji, AND America’s top doctor and friend of the pod Vivek Murthy is now calling for a Surgeon General’s warning label on social media platforms. Max and Jon bask in their success, then mourn the dismantling of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the nation’s leading mis- and disinformation research organization. Then, Max sits down with longtime tech journalist Brian Merchant to talk about whether AI development is slowing down, why workers should organize against the technology, and what good AI use cases and centaurs have in common.

The kids are not alright, and the culprit is their phones. That’s the thesis of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation. He joins Offline to discuss why he thinks smartphones and social media are fueling a teen and adolescent mental health epidemic, the evidence behind his claims, and the criticism his anti-phone crusade has received. Then he and Jon dive into the four recommendations Haidt believes will lead us out of this crisis.

Why are Republicans apologists for misinformation? How should campaigns respond to online trolls? Are Democrats still using an Obama-era digital strategy? Journalist Sasha Issenberg joins Offline to talk about his new book, The Lie Detectives, and to break down how to defeat conservatives in a truth-agnostic world. He and Jon discuss how today’s political class is adapting to a tumultuous and Trumpy social media landscape, and why controlling today’s narrative is more elusive than ever before.

Critic Emily St. James and Crooked’s Halle Kiefer join Max to talk about “WALL-E.” The 2008 Pixar film depicts a future in which humans are so addicted to their screens that it takes a robot mutiny led by a mobile trash compactor to get them to log off. Why did the filmmakers opt for a trashpocalypse? How problematic is the movie’s portrayal of fatness? Why wasn’t there cancel culture aboard the spaceship? Find out in our last installment of Offline Movie Club (for now!).

Birds Aren’t Real founder, Peter McIndoe, joins to talk about the impact of the satirical conspiracy that captured the imagination of Gen Z and what he learned about the appeal of false realities after spending years in character as one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists.

Are we all living in The Matrix? Eh, probably not. But our tech obsessed, social media driven world is a lot closer to the reality The Matrix posed in 1999 than the Wachowskis probably ever dreamed of! New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and host of Hysteria Erin Ryan, join Max to watch the beloved sci fi film and break down the ways The Matrix inspired a generation of tech bros and why so many people — from the online right to the LGBTQ+ community to recovering tech journalists — see themselves in its allegory.