How Screens Have Warped Morality

Summary

Podcast Summary: Offline with Jon Favreau

Episode: How Screens Have Warped Morality
Host: Jon Favreau (Crooked Media)
Guest: Megan Garber (Staff Writer, The Atlantic; Author, Screen People)
Date: May 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Jon Favreau sits down with Megan Garber to discuss how our relationship with screens—particularly the rise of “two-way” interactive technologies—has fundamentally altered our sense of morality and social engagement. Drawing from Garber’s new book Screen People, they examine how internet culture, social media dynamics, and “main character syndrome” have blurred distinctions between public and private, real and performed, and how these effects ripple into our politics, our identities, and our collective moral landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Screen as Stage: From Audience to Actor

[04:01–07:05]

• Performance Anxiety and the Rise of the ‘Main Character’:

  • Garber opens by talking about the surge in propranolol (beta-blocker) prescriptions for performance anxiety—once unique to public speakers or musicians, now common for regular people overwhelmed by social media’s gaze.
    • "So much of life is a performance on some level. And that's not entirely new ... but I think now performance is so much more just kind of a standard way of life. ... We should all be, for better or for worse, main characters." – Megan Garber [05:02]
  • Performance is no longer metaphor: it’s become daily reality.

• One-Way vs. Two-Way Screens:

  • Garber distinguishes between “one-way” screens (TV: passive consumption) and “two-way” screens (internet, smartphones: interactive, reciprocal).
  • This interactivity blurs boundaries between living and performing, making us both audience and actor, often leading to dehumanization.
    • “We are people ... but we are images, we are flat, we are two-dimensional, we are objects, we are pieces of media. There’s this sort of implicit dehumanization that happens on screens.” – Megan Garber [07:05]

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2. Blurring Reality: Confused Distinctions and Overwhelm

[08:52–15:17]

• Distinction Erosion: Fiction vs. Fact

  • Social media places celebrities, family, strangers, cartoons, AI, and tragedy into a single, indistinguishable scroll.
    • "What is this doing to us? Like, it can't be. This can't be normal. We can't be built to process this." – Jon Favreau [12:03]

• Parasocial Relationships & Moral Weight

  • Garber highlights societal confusion between real people and characters, noting that the lines between fact/fiction and performer/person now require navigation in daily life.
    • “A character is owed nothing. A character is a fiction. ... I kept finding myself thinking of these people as characters, in part, in my own defense, because the shows sort of present them as such.” – Megan Garber [09:14]

• Emotional and Cognitive Overload

  • The infinite scroll cultivates an environment where distinctions lose their meaning, and overwhelm is constant.

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3. Screens vs. Socializing: Convenience, Frictionlessness, and Anxiety

[19:22–22:04]

• Decline of In-person Socialization

  • Favreau and Garber discuss the documented drop in socializing, intensified by the pandemic but predating it, linking it to the frictionless, highly curated nature of online interactions.

• The Weight of Performance in Physical Life

  • Physical environments (e.g., heavily “Instagrammable” public spaces) are now designed as backdrops for online presence.
    • “We put the pressure of performance onto ourselves for just daily, regular interactions ... They feel, I think, so much more consequential and weighted now because they can be filmed first of all.” – Megan Garber [19:22]
  • Anxiety about being “on stage” in real life leads many to withdraw, or to feel unease in spontaneous, unmediated spaces.

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4. Political Implications: Entertainment, Passivity, and Public Life

[22:04–31:44]

• Entertainment vs. Public Formation

  • Garber: “Entertainment creates audiences. It does not, however, create publics.” [22:31]
    • Participatory citizenship is replaced by audience passivity; clicking “like” is mistaken for engagement.
    • "Watching can feel like engagement. The algorithms ... often define engagement as just watching. But, of course, I think that is not the engagement that we should have in our minds when we're thinking about how to be good citizens." – Megan Garber [24:56]

• Political Hobbyism & Cynicism

  • The line between political consumers and active participants is blurred, with growing numbers treating politics as episodic “content.”
    • "I was watching this crazy story and it was wild and I thought it was going to end differently, but then it ended badly and I'm not coming back for this season. ... No, that's right. ... it's a game and that it's a show and that we're all actors in the show." – Jon Favreau [25:25]

• Suburbia and Screens: Exclusion and Curation

  • Instagram curation mirrors postwar suburban exclusion, both predicated on control and “safe” sameness.
    • "The promise of social media too, in really the worst ways, because it silos us, it disconnects us, all these kinds of things and we're just replicating these flaws. When the Internet should be a place of community ... but here we are." – Megan Garber [27:28]

• Class, Screen Culture, and Democracy

  • There are divides between the “very online” (often more educated, office-based), and the less-screen-saturated, affecting political engagement and public opinion.

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5. The Rise of Performative Politics

[35:07–44:37]

• From Politicians to Performers

  • Politicians must now perform for attention, often at the expense of substantive leadership.
    • "The ability to perform and become nationally well known is probably one of the most important qualities in any kind of a national candidate ... the line between being good at performing and doing the job of a political leader and just being good at getting attention is very Fuzzy." – Jon Favreau [35:07]

• Race to the Bottom

  • The constant escalation for attention incentivizes shock and spectacle—a “race to the bottom.”
    • "If someone actually did light themselves on fire to get attention ... the person on the other side would say, okay, now we have to light ourselves on fire and do a dance ... it never stops." – Megan Garber [43:01]

• Media Literacy and Individual Agency

  • Garber calls for heightened skepticism and media literacy to consciously reject attention-for-attention’s-sake politics.

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6. The Medium is the Moral: Coarsening and Cynicism

[44:37–50:55]

• Screens as Shapers of Moral Frameworks

  • Garber updates McLuhan’s dictum: “The medium is the moral now.” Our ethics are being reshaped by the dynamics of sharing, spectacle, and self-curation.
    • "I think it is coarsening us, really. ... Over time, things get normalized so easily. ... There is no real exemption from this ... that's the challenge, because there's no way that you can just ignore things." – Megan Garber [45:17]

• Normalization and Desensitization

  • Shocking content (war memes, violence, etc.) loses its power with repetition, leading to numbness and loss of outrage.
    • "The first time you see ... you are outraged. ... By the tenth time it happens, you scroll by it on your feed and you know it's bad, but you lost the ability to be outraged." – Jon Favreau [47:07]

• Cynicism as Existential Threat

  • The great danger is not just desensitization, but collective cynicism, which disables hope and democratic engagement—echoing warnings from both dystopian fiction and historical scholarship.
    • "Cynicism comes up so often in Literary Dystopias, ... also in scholarly works on Russia and totalitarian regimes ... once you lose your hope ... you've essentially given up, right? Like, there's no way, really, that a democracy in a meaningful sense can happen at that point because you are just so unable to sort of have a hope for a better future and to see the best in people." – Megan Garber [48:34]

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7. Paths Forward: Detox, Discernment, and Humanization

[50:55–56:23]

• Personal Coping Strategies

  • Garber describes embracing a “digital sabbath” and even using “phone jail” devices, with partial success, to step back from the screen and re-engage senses.
    • "I do think just sort of putting your phone away, giving your brain a chance to remember what the world is, to touch grass, as they say ... that can be a really great one." – Megan Garber [51:22]

• Resisting Dehumanization and Performative Cynicism

  • Both favor criticizing ideas or actions rather than making cynical assumptions about motives.
    • "When you say that, oh, that's so performative, it's like the ultimate form of cynicism because you're saying ... that what you're doing or saying isn't real, that you have an ulterior motive ... and then becomes, like, very nihilistic." – Jon Favreau [53:41]

• Cultivating Curiosity and Golden Rule Empathy

  • Garber advocates “catching oneself” when turning people into characters or memes, returning to basic humane curiosity and the golden rule.
    • “If we sort of set up ... how do we want to be together and how do we want to treat each other, how do we want to be treated, if we sort of have that as our guiding light ... that will make a tremendous difference.” – Megan Garber [53:41]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On two-way screens as dehumanizing:
  “We are people ... but we are images, we are flat, we are two-dimensional, we are objects, we are pieces of media. There’s this sort of implicit dehumanization that happens on screens.”
  —Megan Garber [07:05]

• On the overlap of fact, fiction, and the self:
  “A character is owed nothing. … I kept finding myself thinking of these people as characters, in part, in my own defense, because the shows sort of present them as such.”
  —Megan Garber [09:14]

• On entertainment and politics:
  “Entertainment creates audiences. It does not, however, create publics.”
  —Megan Garber [22:31]

• On political hobbyism:
  "I was watching this crazy story and it was wild and I thought it was going to end differently, but then it ended badly and I'm not coming back for this season ... it's a game and that it's a show and that we're all actors in the show."
  —Jon Favreau [25:25]

• On cynicism as a threat to democracy:
  “Once you lose your hope, once you become sort of cynical and allow yourselves to see the world in the way that the despot, that the regime wants you to see it, you've essentially given up.”
  —Megan Garber [48:34]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:01] – Garber introduces the metaphor of performance anxiety and main character syndrome
• [07:05] – One-way vs. two-way screens: From passive to interactive
• [09:14] – The “character” problem and reality confusion
• [12:03] – Instagram as a microcosm for the loss of meaningful distinction
• [19:22] – The social costs of frictionless, screen-mediated communication
• [22:31] – Entertainment vs. publics, and democracy as spectator sport
• [27:28] – Suburb, Instagram, and exclusion; performative as dismissive
• [35:07] – Politicians as performers and the “attention” economy of campaigns
• [44:37] – “Medium is the moral”; normalization of violence and outrage fatigue
• [48:34] – Cynicism as the enemy of democracy, drawing from dystopian fiction and history
• [50:55] – Personal strategies for screen management and empathy online

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Conclusion

Megan Garber’s incisive analysis—richly explored in her discussion with Jon Favreau—makes clear that the internet and our interactive screens have not merely reshaped how we communicate, but have altered the very moral and social frameworks by which we live. Whether in the ways we perform our identities or the ways we engage with (and withdraw from) democratic participation, the consequences of our “screen person” era are profound—and demand active, collective reckoning if we wish to reassert shared meaning, responsibility, and hope.

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For more: Read Screen People by Megan Garber, and catch more episodes of Offline with Jon Favreau wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

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[Megan Garber]

Once you lose your hope, once you become sort of cynical and allow yourselves to see the world in the way that the despot, that the regime wants you to see it, you've essentially given up, right? Like there's no way really that a democracy in a meaningful sense can happen at that point because you are just so unable to sort of have a hope for a better future and to see the best in people. And everything just becomes, you know, Lowell, nothing matters, right? And everything is just a game just to show everyone's a character or a non player character or whatever it might be. It's despair. Like that's what that is. And yet it's so natural for us to want to take refuge in that because, you know, the reality of things hurts.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau and you just heard from today's guest, Megan Garber. Megan writes about the intersection of Internet and culture over at the Atlantic, and last week she published one of the most offline books I've read in years. It's called Screen People. In it, she illustrates how we're no longer just an audience for the media we consume. We're also actors and producers in an endless show of our own creation and that of our friends, our colleagues, our political opponents, even of people walking down the street. The two way screens we carry around in our pockets make it hard to tell the difference between living and performing, between ironic and earnest, between reality and illusion. This isn't just changing the content we're addicted to, it's changing the entire ethical framework of our society. Megan makes a very strong case that the medium is no longer just the message, as Marshall McLuhan argued in 1964. Nor is it just the metaphor, as Neil Postman, an offline forefather, if you will, posited a few decades later. Today, Megan says the Medium is the moral. And it turns out we don't treat each other so well when we're all just extras in each other's shows. I talked with Meghan about the corrosive nature of an Internet filled with main characters, whether it's possible to overcome screen person syndrome, and why no less than our survival as a country and maybe even a planet depends on it. We'll get to that conversation in a moment, but before we do, please consider becoming a crooked media subscriber if you haven't already, so that you don't miss out on any of the great content we're putting out for our friends at the pod. Subscribers get our new extra episode of Pod Save America called Pod Save America. Only friends. Other subscriber only shows like Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer, access to all of our excellent substack newsletters and ad free episodes of all your favorite crooked pods. Pod Save America offline. Love it or leave it. Pod Save the World. On top of it all, you get to feel good about supporting one of the few independent, proudly pro democracy media outlets left in Trump's America. So head to crooked.com friends and go subscribe now. Here's Megan Garber. Megan, welcome back to the show.

[Megan Garber]

Hi. Thanks for having me.

[Jon Favreau]

Your new book, Screen People, is such a perfect fit for the show that I was worried there wouldn't be new ground for us to cover, but it turns out there's plenty. And you come at this for better and for worse. Yeah, no. And you come at this topic from such a smart angle. And I just really enjoyed the book and I thought we could start with how you open the Atlantic piece that's adapted from the book, which is with propranolol prescription surging for people who don't know those are beta blockers used off label for stage fright. Yes, exactly. It's so funny. I couldn't say the word, though I had been. I have fear of flying and I was first prescribed those, thinking that like maybe I could do that because it was lighter than Xanax and that didn't work. So I ended up with the Xanax. But any I knew they were beta blockers.

[Megan Garber]

Something that works, right?

[Jon Favreau]

Exactly. Why was that your way in? And what do you think it tells us? That we are medicating ourselves the same way like concert pianists do?

[Megan Garber]

Yes, I think. Oh, it's such a good question. I think, you know, stage fright, like whether you get it as sort of a psychological condition or whether maybe you've just sort of experienced it offhand But a. I think it's something that a lot of us have experienced over time. Right. Like just at some point in our lives. I happen to have a fairly like, extreme version of it. So I. It's something I've really had to like, work through, you know, just even to be able to have a conversation like this. Like, it's something I've had to work toward because I do get nervous. But I think the fact that it is so relatable that we would just be medicating ourselves out of our nervousness and out of our fear of kind of, I think, other people's eyes essentially, and other people's stare and gaze and all that kind of stuff, it struck me just as revealing, but also as just a powerful metaphor for where we are in culture right now, where so much of life is a performance on some level. And that's not entirely new. Sociologists have for a long time talked about performance as kind of a metaphor for social interaction. We have social scripts and all that kind of stuff. But I think now performance is so much more just kind of a standard way of life. There are expectations that when we interact, it should have the polish of a performance, it should have the charisma of a performance. We should all be, for better or for worse, main characters. Right. And have main character energy. And just, you know, so much of life, I think, is oriented now toward the show in a way that I think a lot of us are aware of, but we're not quite sure, like how to deal with it or articulate it or whatever. And so propranolol, I hope I said it right, was my. Was my way into that. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

So the book hinges on this distinction between one way screens and two way screens. One way screens being what we had been used to television for decades, two way screens now, the phones. For people who've never thought about it that way. What changes when the screen looks back when it's a two way screen?

[Megan Garber]

Ooh, yes, yes. So much changes. But I think it can be hard to tell what changes because screens do look like television, right? Like my computer screen that I'm looking at right now, it does look like a television. The main difference is I am on it. I am talking with you on it, through it. Right. Like we're having just a normal human conversation. But it is happening through the screen. And the fact of the screen, I think changes a lot of the other facts of just how we relate to each other in big obvious ways. I mean, the fact that we're not in the same room together, but I think in smaller ways, too. And so I think the two way screen, the interactive screen, it can be tempting to see it like television, like sort of an extension of what television is. But I do think that that's actually not a helpful way to think about it, because what an Internet screen is, what an Internet connected interactive screen is, is sort of a portal. What Marshall McLuhan, the media scholar who's a big inspiration for the book, you know, he talked about mediums as sort of like conduits, right? And so it is a direct medium between people that shapes how people interact together. And, you know, on a. We are people, right, Having a conversation just like humans have for thousands of years. And yet we are images, we are flat, we are two dimensional, we are objects, we are pieces of media. There's this sort of implicit dehumanization that happens on screens, but it doesn't always feel that way because we are people, we are interacting. It's become so normal in so short of a time, and yet there is a dehumanization that happens. And I think that explains a lot of what we're reckoning with on the Internet right now. The tensions that we're having is we don't quite know how to be people across the distance of the screen.

[Jon Favreau]

One thing you have noted too, is that there's this sort of leveling effect where the screen sort of also confuses what's real, what's fake, what's tragedy, what's comedy, what's funny, what's serious. I'm curious, how have you noticed this confluence in your own life?

[Megan Garber]

Ooh. I mean, I've noticed myself. Well, first of all, I should say I watch a lot of tv. It is part of my job, it is part of my life. I would do it if I were not professionally obligated to do it. So I noticed it really with myself. Like, a lot of the themes of the book are things that I just sort of noticed in my own life and didn't like, you know, just I was noticing myself kind of looking at reality characters, for example, reality stars, reality performers, and I mean, I even just use the word character, right? But, like, they're not characters. And the difference between a person and a character is the difference between everything else, right? A character is owed nothing. A character is a fiction. A character does not matter because a character on a very basic level does not exist. And yet I kept finding myself thinking of these people as characters, in part, in my own defense, because the shows sort of present them as such. You Know, like, the shows present these people who are somewhat characters, somewhat performers, somewhat actors, but they are playing the role of themselves. And so when I started sort of interrogating like, why am I using the wrong words? Why don't I. Why can't I find the right words to talk about these people who are on my tv, who are, you know, in this. This genre of reality TV that is defining so much of this moment. And why is it so hard to talk about? Why is it so hard for me to talk about? Which I. I'm sure you. You have this as a writer too. Like, when you are a writer and you cannot find the right words, it is maddening, right? It's such a particular genre of frustration. And I just kept feeling myself having that frustration of. I don't quite know how to describe this to myself. I don't quite know how to convey that to readers. And the frustration, you know, if it had just been a me problem, that's fine, you know, and you can find ways around it. They are performers, that's fine. You can call them that and move on with your life. But what kept striking me was that it felt like the confusion I was feeling as a culture critic was shared. And was you very common, actually, that, like, on a broader level, even if you're not a cultural critic who writes about reality TV shows, like, there is still that kind of abiding and definitional confusion about what people are on reality shows on, you know, the Crown, historical dramas, things like that. Just sort of these basic questions of who are they? What are they? And since I couldn't answer, I thought maybe like that when I tried to answer the questions for myself, it might be interesting for others, too.

[Jon Favreau]

I felt like this one example is Instagram. And I remember when Instagram started and Instagram was just like the place that you put pictures for your group of friends. And it was a small group of friends and you all saw each other and you saw each other's pictures and you commented on each other's pictures, right?

[Megan Garber]

You're so beautiful.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes, right. It started there and now. And TikTok is like this to an extreme. But now if you're scrolling, it's like, what does it do to us to see person, you know, like, person that might be in your family, person that you don't know, that you've never met before. Stranger, Famous person that you know because they're famous. Someone playing a character on a show, a cartoon, and then like, AI now, and it's like. But like, you're not watching Anything separately. You're just doing it all and going, going, going. And I've always thought to myself, I' what is this doing to us? Like, it can't be. This can't be normal. We can't be built to process this.

[Megan Garber]

Yes. My head is actually feeling a little bit dizzy just hearing you describe that. Because it's so true. It's so overwhelming. And I think in general, we have built up. We as really a species, a human species, but we as sort of a collective society, too, have built up hundreds and in some senses, thousands of years worth of experience in terms of how to make distinctions between people who are famous, people who are real, people who aren't real. You know, there's a whole history of sort of people trying to distinguish, like, what is fact and what is fiction and to try to, like, instrumentalize those distinctions and make it easier then for us, the regular people in the world with our regular little brains to process it all, right? And I think so much of what happens on screens and on the Internet and on social media, like you said in particular, is we lose those distinctions. And it's hard to sort of fully wrap your head around, I think, because it doesn't feel like we're losing them. Right. It feels like everything sort of is under control. Like, we've got the scroll, we've got the, you know, it's infinite scroll. That's how it's supposed to work. You swipe and you do the thing and, you know, you click and you like and all of that. And it just. It's already become so much a piece of our muscle memory, I think, to sort of engage with each other on this level that it doesn't feel, I think, again, as dehumanizing as it actually kind of is. And so I think it's very natural. You know, you mentioned the confluence, like, the celebrities and your parents and your, you know, just everything coming together, the puppy pictures and the tragedies. And I think a. It's just overwhelming, you know, and it can. It just overwhelm. Is never a good thing for a human brain. Right. Like, we are not good at being overwhelmed. I can speak for myself, but I think I can speak for a lot of other people too. But also, like, the distinctions between. Between a famous person and, like, your mom or your family member, that is a very crucial distinction that, like, in human history, we have put moral weight behind. Right? But now we are losing a lot of those distinctions. And so I think coming to see celebrities like friends, you know, parasocial relationships and all these kinds of things where we're seeing the celebrities as our friends. I think we're seeing the people that are closer to us as a little bit of celebrities in the sense that they are performing too, right? And all these things are sort of coming together in a way that it's not always bad, but often it is bad because we are. I think it harms us in our ability to actually interact as people.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Megan Garber]

Yes, I think that. Thank you. That was such a great description of things. Yes. I think that's absolutely what's happening. I think so many of the trends that start on the screen do not stay contained to it, right? Like, they just have a way of sort of breaching out into the real world, IRL world, physical world, whatever you want to call it. I mean, even just basic, like so many sort of architectures of the physical world right now are sort of primed for Instagram, right? Like, you know, like where I live in Washington D.C. like, you know, just there's public art everywhere that is very clearly designed to be the backdrop for a selfie, right? Or just all these, you know, good vibes, only signs and, you know, just all this kind of stuff. It is meant to be photographed. It is meant to be the backdrop for selfies. And I think that's a pretty nice metaphor for what happens generally, which is exactly like you described. I think we put the pressure of performance onto ourselves for just daily regular interactions. And, you know, I mentioned my own, like, you know, stage fright that, like, it's, you know, I've never really felt it off a stage. It's always been when I know a lot of eyes are on me and that's when things get a little murky. But like, I'm aware of it in a certain way because I know what it feels like to have that fear. And I have definitely had that either fear or anxiety, like you said, of sort of the interaction. And what if I don't say it exactly as I, I wanted to? Or what if I misspeak? What if I make a bad joke? What if I, you know, just. What if they don't laugh and, you know, just all these sort of anxieties that I think everyone on some level probably has, you know, and are very like eternal and just sort of fundamental to human interaction and all that kind of stuff. But they feel, I think, so much more consequential and weighted now because they can be filmed first of all, like our interaction is being filmed, right? And I will misspeak. I just did right there and I didn't even mean to. It was just. But like, you know, it happens, right? And I think, like, it will bother me more now that it's being recorded, right, Than if it were just an in person interaction that only you and I witness. So like just the fact of the screen, the fact of the stage and the audience does just fundamentally change things, you know, in small ways and in big. But I think that because things can now, you know, we can be, we can have a picture taken of ourselves, you know, an inopportune moment out in the world. We can be creep shotted. We can now have the pictures that are taken of us, like, turned into deep fakes. You know, there's so much, I think, vulnerability that comes with existing, simply existing, simply being out in the physical world because of cameras, because of screens. And I think it's very natural that we would be aware of it and sort of have anxiety about it. But I think we also don't quite know where to put the anxiety or how to deal with it because it's all so new, right?

[Jon Favreau]

Right now it is, and it's only getting worse. I do want to spend some time on the political implications of us becoming screen people, since that is my wheelhouse and what I spend most of my days thinking about. There's a line in the book that I keep thinking about, entertainment creates audiences. It does not, however, create publics. Maybe walk us through why you think entertainment can't build publics.

[Megan Garber]

Sure. I think entertainment can be a great thing, right. And the subhead of the book, how we Entertained Ourselves into a state of emergency. I do think that the core of the problem is entertainment, but it's not the fun of it. You know, like, fun is great. It's not the relatability of it. Like a lot of the things I think that are happening in politics in terms of so much being understood as entertainment, you know, politics via meme politics, you know, just all these kinds of things, they're actually really good for democracy. They are what I think the founders had in mind when they were writing the First Amendment. And thinking through the implications of speech and all of that, I think it can be wonderful. But I think the problem with entertainment in particular is it's such a kind of distant thing, right? Like, you don't. You are entertained, you don't. You. You passively consume what is put on the stage for you. That's what entertainment effectively is, you know. And you are therefore exempt from what happens on the stage when you are being entertained. Right. Like you watch even the architecture of a theater, for example, you know, which is in some ways replicated on the screen. Like the audience sits in these seats that do not move. And it would be really uncomfortable to even try to move. You're kind of rude if you try to move right in the middle of a performance and the stage is set separately and there is a marked division between the audience and the performers. And that is the assumption that we have brought into, I think, our relationship with entertainment in general. Right. And like with screens in general, and that distinction is going away because again, with the two way screens, like, we are. We are participants at the same time that we are consumers. Right. Like, it's all happening at the same time. But I think in terms of politics in particular, that leaves us in a really difficult place because the question is, well, we're watching the politics happen, right? As kind of a story, as a narrative, as maybe a source of entertainment. Often politics can be quite entertaining and ridiculous and all of that stuff. But then the question is, well, then how do we insert ourselves in that? Right? Like, it's so easy, I think, just to watch passively. And so much in our culture, and screen culture in particular, encourages us, I think, to watch passively or to do, you know, I'm going to like a post and that will be my political engagement for the day and all that kind of stuff. And I. You talk about this so wonderfully on the show, so I feel like I'm, you know.

[Jon Favreau]

No, no, I. Screenplaining.

[Megan Garber]

But. But I do think that that is sort of the upshot of like, just, you know, like, we don't quite know what it means to engage in this moment because watching can feel like engagement. And the algorithms and the platforms and everything often define engagement as just watching. Right. Like, that is how they define things. It's very natural we would sort of take that in. But of course, I think that is not the engagement that we should have in our minds when we're thinking about how to be good citizens and how to be good participants in a democracy.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. I mean, it's the difference between political participation and political hobbyism, you know, which we've talked about, and in a different way, and especially this is true. I think at the beginning of Trump's second term, there's a lot of people be like, oh, I just had to turn it off. Which is also like a very entertainment screen type thing, which is like, I was watching. I was watching this crazy story and it was wild and I thought it was going to end differently, but then it ended badly and I'm not coming back for this season. I'm done. I'm going to go focus on something else. And it's like, no, that's right, that's right. We came there. Whether you turn the channel or we're here, we're here and it's just happening to us. Yes, but it is, it's, it's. It is something I think about a lot because, you know, and we also get told by people who come up to us and they'll say, oh, well, obviously politics is awful, but at least it's a lot for you guys to talk about. At least it's like good content. You guys have a lot to do and a lot to say. And I'm like, I would say nothing and end these podcasts forever if it meant, like we could have a normal politics where we did not have to worry about Donald Trump every day. But you can see, like that people are primed to not believe that because they just. The whole culture makes us think that it is a. And, you know, it comes from the top with Trump. But it's much deeper than that, that it's a game and that it's a show and that we're all actors in the show.

[Megan Garber]

That's right. And nothing matters, therefore. Right. Like the person who can make the best show, the most entertaining show, the most shocking show, they are the winners. Right. And that is true for entertainment. That's fair enough. And that's what we, I think, are calibrated for culturally. But yeah, again, terrible way to do politics. Yeah. Content is not. We would trade a lot for content.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, exactly.

[Megan Garber]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

In the chapter, the sets, you draw this beautiful line from the post war suburb to Instagram, both as ways of keeping strangers out. What's the political consequence of that connection? And I always thought of like, is the suburban coalition basically, like the screen coalition?

[Megan Garber]

Ooh. Oh, that's interesting. It could be. It very well could be. I mean, I love that way of putting it. I do think that, you know, again, to the question of sort of like, are we activated and are we implicated in what happens to us politically? I think that, you know, the suburbs in so many ways that are kind of shocking today to like read about how people thought about them at the times, but like, they were very self consciously exclusionary. Right. They were saying, like, we don't want the city with everything that, that implied. We want organized, we want everything the same. We want control. This is America. Right. Like, and there was this very self conscious effort to sort of propagandize suburbs into what it means to be American and to what, what America actually means, you know, white picket fences and all this kind of stuff. And it was just so fundamentally exclusionary and such a kind of, I think, impoverished view of what the country could be and the nation could be. And I do think that we definitely see that on Instagram and social media, where everything is curated. Right? Everything is. We're going to present this, this front. We're going to, you know, everything's going to look great from the Outside, you don't know what's going on inside. But like, on the outside, things are going to look totally ordered and that's going to reassure people that everything's okay. And, you know, there's the word performative I've, I've been really interested in before this book, but definitely during the writing of the book. And I think the fact that performative, it used to actually be in the sociological literature, something that implied power and community. Like, performative meant something that people created together. So they were like social scripts that people could sort of write in the moment. And so if you were being performative, you were sort of working with another person, your scene partner or whatever it would be to sort of create a reality together. And you could take the accepted scripts or you could edit them and change them. And, you know, there was a lot of like freedom and power in that. And I think the fact that so often today, performative, the word is just used as a dismissal, right? It's, oh, they're just faking, they're just show, they're just putting on a performance. They're virtue signaling, they're vice signaling, whatever it might be. And that's the assumption we make. And I think actually to bring it back to the initial question, I think that is a very suburban idea in a certain sense. And I, you know, nothing against the suburbs as places. I, you know, suburbs can be great. But I do think that, you know, there is this kind of, they were built anyway on this kind of fundamental incuriosity, right? And this ability to say, like, I am here in my bubble and I am safe and protected and, you know, nothing will challenge me, nothing will surprise me. And I do think that that is sort of the promise of social media too, in really the worst ways, because it silos us, it disconnects us, all these kinds of things and we're just replicating these flaws. When the Internet should be a place of community, right? And it should be the opposite of the suburbs. But here we are, here we are reading it.

[Jon Favreau]

I was wondering if there's a class element of this as well, because the screen conditions you describe, the, the performance anxiety, the party deficit, the ambient self surveillance, it feels like a, if not mostly disproportionately college educated, mostly online condition and there's political implications there just because I do think there is a very online cohort on both sides, right and left, that just, they treat politics differently. It's more hobbyism there. There's. I say they, it's us, it's me, I'm Part of it. Right. Like we're all online more and then, you know, we all get surprised because then in an election when people haven't. Who. People who haven't tuned in the whole election still vote and everyone's like, surprised at how, you know, non college educated people are voting. And everyone, you know, talks about the education divide. But I do wonder if there's also a screen divide there too, where a lot of people who aren't, you know, sitting in office jobs all the time aren't as sort of enmeshed in the screen culture as the rest of us and what that does to our politics.

[Megan Garber]

Yeah. Oh, I love that question. One of the thinkers that I cite in the book who really was formative for me was Walter Lippmann. The early 20th century, wrote in the 1920s and onward, newspaperman, journalist, et cetera. And so his sort of, I would say his classic book is Public Opinion that I write a little bit about in the book. And it's mostly known as a way to sort of think about public relations, right? To think about the impact of public relations PR on information gathering, you know, and again, 1920s. So basically, 100 years ago, I think Lippmann was understanding one of the core problems of our moment that we still deal with. And I think a lot of the problems of. Of, you know, just sort of PR as an idea, this basic idea that you shape the narrative before the narrative is then handed on to the people, that. That remains with us. And that is a core problem with screens as well. Right. Where there are deepfakes, where there are, you know, there's always a question of what's real and what isn't. But when it comes to the class question, Lippmann also, at the end of Public Opinion, had this kind of a conclusion where he said, I don't think this can work. Not quite in those words. I'm putting words into his mouth now. But he. He was wondering, like, are. Do we ask too much of people in a democracy? Do we ask them, he called them omnicompetent citizens. Like democracy as we have practiced it, as it was practiced in the 1920s and still today, sort of assumes that every person has to know a little bit about everything, right? Like, they. To be a good, responsible voter and member of the public, you need to know a little bit about Iran, you need to know a little bit about Pakistan, you need to, you know, like, you need to know oil prices and this and that. And it's just so much. And I think even for professionals, it is so Much to know. And things are always changing. And then. So to ask citizens to do that. It does. I mean, I think Lippmann very much had a point, and I think we are still kind of reckoning with that kind of unanswered question of sort of, you know, are. Is democracy asking too much? And that's not an argument, of course, against democracy, but it is sort of an open question about how we think about what each person does and should be responsible for in a democracy. And then I think, just to relate it a little bit more specifically to the class question, I think, I mean, screens are like, they do sort of establish these separate hierarchies that are related to traditional class structures, but not quite right. And there's the class of the, you know, terminally online, or however you want to call it. You know, there's posters class, there's the lurkers class. You know, there are all these kind of like, mini ecosystems within the broader social Internet, right, that amount to often class systems. And often, I think what happens is the people that exert power within those structures, you know, whether it's a Reddit mod or, you know, just whatever it might be, like, those are the people that end up having so much sway over politics and so much influence over everyone else. And that can be fine. But I think also the fact remains these are unelected people. They're not traditionally part of the system as we conceive it. So I think it is sort of an open question, how do we reckon with all that? Right. And how do we preserve what we want to of democracy while still preserving the Internet, Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Which currently seems impossible, but getting harder. You talk about how I want to talk about. We talk about voters, talk about politicians. You talk about how politicians are no longer expected to do the job, they're expected to perform the job. You know, the Rock gets approached by both parties and, you know, Matthew McConaughey gets mentioned as the gubernatorial candidate in Texas. Putting my Democratic strategist hat on, I can tell you this is one thing I think about, like, constantly. And I both. I both hate that this is the reality, but. But also think that the ability to perform and become nationally well known is probably one of the most important qualities in any kind of a national candidate, or even a candidate in a state as big as ours here in California, which we are currently seeing play out in the governor's race. But I also think that the line between being good at performing and doing the job of a political leader and just being good at getting attention is very Fuzzy. And I wonder, like, how, how you think about that?

[Megan Garber]

Oh, yeah. Oh, it's a great question. And it's sort of a perennial question too, right? Like, it's so, it's so new and acute in this moment for all the reasons you just described. But I do think it is something that we as a culture, as a, as a civic body, have been reckoning with since the early days. I think back to like, you know, the founders were like, desperately fearful of charisma, of political charisma, you know, that they, they thought, and I think probably correctly and with a lot of historical evidence on their side that like, you know, charisma in the hands of the wrong person can be an incredibly dangerous thing. That's how demagogues happen. That's how dictators happen, you know, and I, we, we are seeing, I think, a lot of the consequences of that now. I mean, one thing I would say, I think it, it is such a good question, and I, I, I, I, I wish I had a more specific answer to it because I think it actually does get to the heart of so much. But what I would say is when it comes to our own agency, as members of the public, as people in a democracy, we do have say. It's not just like things happen to us. I think so often because of the power differentials that we have in our system. It can be so easy to feel like everything is done to us and, you know, for us and on us. And to a large extent that is probably true. But I think also we have ways to fight back. Like, that's the whole point too, right, of democracy and how the system should work. And so one way I think that we could sort of step up as people is just question like, is this the kind of charisma that we want? Right? Is this the kind of like, you know, we can choose not to like the meme, not to like the, you know, if there's a cruel post being, you know, forwarded around, regardless of the team, regardless, right, of the, of who, whose side it's on, or whatever it might be, we can say, I'm not going to like it. I'm going to actually, you know, say, I don't want to be part of this. Or, you know, just things along those lines, like little things that actually, because of the scale of the Internet, can actually have a huge effect. So I do think that that is one answer, is just rethinking actually what political charisma is and, you know, kind of setting our own limits, like, what will we accept what will we not? And it's, I'm making it sound maybe like it's an easy thing. And of course it's not an easy thing. It's very, you know, it's really getting to like fundamentals. But I think that's sort of where we are on the Internet, is that we actually do need to sort of come together and hopefully as a collective and as a community, like rethink these very basic things and sort of answer basic questions for ourselves in light of the Internet. And basically, you know, is this the world we want to be living in? Is this the world we want to give to our kids? And if the answer is no, we should change it.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Jon Favreau]

I think about, like, the last decade or so of presidential candidates, major party nominees, and it's like, Donald Trump was famous, right?

[Megan Garber]

In America.

[Jon Favreau]

One of the more famous people in America, Hillary Clinton was the wife of a president and then a senator. Joe Biden was Barack Obama's vice president. Obama's a good example of someone who sort of came from nowhere just on his own charisma, right? But we are left with, and we can talk about it here in California, right? Like, Governor Newsom was very well known before he was governor, he was lieutenant governor, and gay marriage sort of propelled him to stardom, and Jerry Brown before him and Schwarzenegger and all these people. And now we have candidates who are like, they can't get known. So then, you know, strategic will say, well, the way to get known today is you gotta get attention. And Donald Trump, you know, he knows how to get attention and he's really good at get attention. So if you get attention, you get well known. And then people are like, well, you know, you can get attention if you light yourself on fire, right? Like, people will pay attention to you. But, like, is that the right attention? And there is this whole, like, well, all attention is good attention. Well, it depends on what, what your purpose is, right? Like, if you just want to, to get attention for the sake of getting attention, sure, all attention is good attention. But if you are trying to govern a polity, and especially one as big as America and like representative democracy in a responsible way, then the target becomes very small because, like, you must get attention and do something to get attention that does not render you a demagogue or a fool.

[Megan Garber]

Exactly. Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

That's what I know. That's the target that I think the Democratic Party has to hit next time. And I just don't know how to do that because it is. So I think it's very, very tricky.

[Megan Garber]

It is very tricky. And also it's such a race to the bottom, right? Because, you know, like, say someone actually did light themselves on fire to get attention. Like, then, you know, the person on the other side would say, okay, well, now we have to light ourselves on fire and do a dance as we're, you know, like, building. Right. And there's just. There's no. It never stops. And so I do think, though, that that is one way that the public can sort of have a role in it. Right. If we just, like, if we can sort of, you know, media literacy, I think, is just such an important part of all of this. And I think just on a level of media literacy, if we can sort of understand how the incentives of the intention economy work, which I think a lot of people do, just implicitly like spending time on social media, like, you do get a very good sense of what the incentives are, for better or for worse. Right. And I think if we can sort of port that skepticism, that knowledge of the workings of things to our sense of politics, we can then be a little bit better equipped to say, wait a sec, is that politician? Like, what are they saying beyond getting my attention? Are they just shocking me to get my eyeballs, or are they shocking me to share a message? And if, you know, if so, is it a message that I want and agree with? You know? And so I think if we can just slowly and over time kind of pull things back to, like, the actual issues that matter, the matters of life and death, the moral questions, the communal questions, the questions about our shared fate and future, like, that will help a lot. But it does take every one of us, I think, to sort of push back and reject these very cynical ideas about what. What political charisma is and what political attention should involve.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. One of the central arguments in your book is that the medium is the moral now. Right. That this is changing our sort of moral framework and our moral environment. And it made me think about how the Trump administration has posted about immigrants being detained and deported, ships being blown up in the Caribbean, targets being blown up in Iran, and it's all memes and trolls and video game type posts, and it's mixing real violence and suffering with pop culture and entertainment. And, like, I don't think that any of this has really helped them politically, but what do you think it's doing to the rest of us?

[Megan Garber]

I think it is coarsening us, really. I think it is. You know, it's. I want to be someone who resists that kind of messaging. Right? Like, I want to be someone who says, you know, I'm going to look at that image and be horrified. Right. Or I'm going to read that meme and be offended on behalf of myself and all of humanity, basically. You know, But I think over time, things get normalized so easily. And because they're in the context of politics where, you know, everything is a constant competition. Right. And so you. It's not happening in a bubble. It's, you know, the Democrats then are having to say, okay, well, what is our answer to this? How do we deal with this? Like, there is no real exemption, right, from this, and it would be nice if there were, but there isn't. And so there has to be some reaction. And that's the challenge, because there's no way that you can just ignore things, right. Or just say, like, well, that's not how I want to be. So I'm not going to be like that and just close it. You know, that's not an option. And so I think it's really incumbent on all of us to sort of think systematically almost about the question that you just asked. Like, why, like, do we want this? What is this doing to us? Is this the world we want? And I do think that's the operative question. And it can be hard because it's so broad. Right. And it's so like, well, what do you do with the answer? Right. But I think the answer, if we do not want this, if we do not want a leader, whoever he or she might be, you know, modeling this for us as, this is what America is, this is what our culture is. This is who we are together. If we do not want that, that needs to be the operative point of everything else. Right. Like, that is the basics question, and everything else can kind of flow from that. So I think really it does involve getting back to just these basics of just like, human interaction. Right. And, like, how do we want to be human together? And I think very often what happens right now is we are not doing a very good job of it together on the screens.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Because I think. And this is a very sort of political lens to look at things, and people are like, well, that's not going to build them more support, and that's not going to convince anyone. But it's not that it has to convince anyone. It's that the first time you see the video of them blowing up the boat, you are outraged. And the second time you are, like, shocked that it happened again. And then by the tenth time it happens, you scroll by it on your feed and you know it's bad, but you lost the ability to be outraged. And for so long, I think the answer is, like, don't normalize this. And, like, that doesn't work to tell someone not to normalize it.

[Megan Garber]

But it's like, I'm not normalizing it, right? Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Like, I find myself trying to look at this and be like, no, no, no. Be as angry as you were the first time you saw this, because it's still happening. It's still awful. And it's not like that episode is over, you know, like, which is the. It's. Which is the whole story of the trial. And I think, you know, they know this, right? Like, if. If there's any intention to what they're doing, it's not to build support for their policies. It's to say, we want to be able to do this without anyone bugging us and pushing back on it. And in order to do that, we have to make it normal for people. We have to just keep doing it and fight through the outrage. And at some point, everyone will be tuckered out. I mean, this was like, Putin figured this out with Ukraine, right? Like, there was gonna be an invasion and everyone's gonna free up. But, like, if I can outlast the Ukrainians and I can take this a couple years, support's gonna dwindle for this cause. People are gonna pay attention to other shit, and then that's that.

[Megan Garber]

Right, Right. Exactly this. And it's so. It's frustrating because it's weaponizing our own kind of brains and biology against us. Right? Like, our brains are so well calibrated to kind of move on to the next thing. Like, we don't want to be in pain. We don't. Whether it's our own pain or pain of others that we've witnessed. Like, we don't want that. We want to shut it out. And our brains are very, very, very good at doing that. So on some level, we're having to fight against really who we are, I think, to deal with this new environment. But I think, to me, that this is another core of things. Right. Is just like cynicism. Cynicism comes up so often in Literary Dystopias, 1984, whatever it might be. It also comes up in scholarly works on Russia and totalitarian regimes throughout the 20th century. Hannah Arendt talked about cynicism as kind of the core problem of a populace, the core thing that will happen among a populace before it sort of gives over to a totalitarian power structure. Like, once you lose your hope, once you become sort of cynical and allow yourselves to see the world in the way that the despot, that the regime wants you to see it, you've essentially given up. Right. Like, there's no way, really, that a democracy in a Meaningful sense can happen at that point because you are just so unable to sort of have a hope for a better future and to see the best in people. And everything just becomes, you know, Lowell, nothing matters, right? And everything is just, just a game just to show everyone's a character or a non player character or whatever it might be. And just, you know, it's despair. Like that's what that is. And yet it's so natural for us to want to take refuge in that because, you know, the reality of things hurts and. But I think, like, if we can get a little bit better about just sort of meeting the realities head on and forcing ourselves to look, forcing ourselves not to forget that these things are happening as hard as it is, like that's part of the responsibility of a democracy and that's part of what we owe to each other, I think is especially in this really pivotal moment, especially now.

[Jon Favreau]

Last question. You co host a podcast called how to Know what's Real. You write a book about screens. You are presumably online a lot. Where's your own line? How do you metabolize all of this without it eating you? Any tips?

[Megan Garber]

Oh, goodness. Oh, boy, boy, boy. I mean, I do, I will say I do a digital Sabbath kind of idea. I do inspire, actually, by offline, like, Like, I think it's a really good idea to just have that little bit of detox, whatever that might look like for an individual person. I do try to put my phone down, I will admit. I got one of those phone jails. Have you seen these?

[Jon Favreau]

Yes. Oh, yeah.

[Megan Garber]

Oh, I am the owner. Not one, but two, actually, I was. I got one for myself.

[Jon Favreau]

Has it worked? Have you used it?

[Megan Garber]

It didn't work great. Didn't work great. It should have worked. But the thing is, you always know, you, you know, there's hammers, you could, you know, there are ways you can break your phone out. So. So if you're a true addict, they're not going to do much good. But if you're not at that level of sadness, then they should work great. But so I do think just sort of putting your phone away, giving your brain a chance to remember what the world is, to touch grass, as they say, and to kind of be outside and to smell and hear and use your senses and all that kind of stuff, that can be a really great one. And then in terms of just the coarsening of things, in terms of the role that I think we all can play in this ecosystem that we're building, I mean, I just try to catch myself, you know, When I think of someone as a character, for example, you know, I, like so many journalists in the heyday of Twitter, spend a lot of time on Twitter. And so I was there for the peak days of main character energy. You know, this idea that, like, the main character is the person on Twitter that you do not want to be. All this kind of stuff and watching all these pylons and stuff, and I just began to realize that when I found myself sort of giving over to that way of seeing. And, you know, when I. When I thought of myself as thinking of someone else as a character and just being like, oh, that's today's main character, or, you know, referring to someone as their hashtag, meme name, whatever it might be, you know, and just to sort of step back and remind myself, like, that's not who they are. That is who they are online. That is a name given that is, you know, and just sort of to remember the humanity of it all. And, like, just. I mean, it's so basic, but, like, sort of the golden rule of it all too, like, is like, if this were me being piled up on, how would I feel and would I want this and is this fair? And just these very basic questions of interaction. But that is actually, I think, really important to do because it can be hard to do because it can feel so simplistic almost, right? Like, not just simple, but simplistic, and not up to the challenges that we face, which are so huge and complicated and all of that kind of thing. But I do think that if we sort of set up the kind of, how do we want to be together and how do we want to treat each other, how do we want to be treated if we sort of have that as like our guiding light and our North Star and all that kind of stuff, that will make a tremendous difference. So I try to live that in my life. I don't always succeed. I have not really made good work of the phone jail. But I try. I try. And I think, you know, trying at least is something, right?

[Jon Favreau]

So, I mean, look, the phone jail is great, and the putting the phone jail is great. And then. And I do think, and I've thought about this a lot more, not just because I feel like I've given up and I'm weak now, but, like, I was like, all right, we gotta be on the phone in a better way, right? And we gotta interact on social media in a better way. And one thing, and your. Your cynicism point reminded me of this in your sort of performative point, right? Which is like. And they're connected. Which is when you say that, oh, that must, that's so performative. It's like the ultimate form of cynicism because you're saying to someone that, that what you're doing or saying isn't real, that you have an ulterior motive, that it's not genuine, which is, of course, very hard to disprove, and then becomes, like, very nihilistic. And so I also was like, I'm not gonna stop criticizing people. That's part of what I do for a living. People are gonna criticize me, but I'm like, well, how would I wanna be criticized? Well, I want an idea to be criticized. That I said, if I have an opinion, I would love that to be criticized. If I said something that, that upset someone, criticize that. But when someone does something, you're like, well, they just did that because they're trying to get attention or they want to make money, or they think that this is, this is good for their brand or this is good business for them, or they just want the clicks. And I have been guilty of this, of saying this for, like, years, of course, but I really lately have been trying to avoid doing that. It's like, can you criticize someone for their idea or their statement without trying to guess their motivation? Because we don't know what people, we, we can be pretty sure what someone's motivation is, but we cannot be sure what their motivation is. And we don't want people guessing our motivations. Right. Like, or, or misunderstanding them. So I, I, that's one way that I've, I've been thinking of. We'll, we'll see if it lasts.

[Megan Garber]

But that's amazing. No, I really do love that. And I also love just the question of why. Right. Like, it's so easy to make assumptions on online, and it's so easy to think that, oh, I know why they did that. But often we don't. Right? And like, we don't know.

[Jon Favreau]

We don't know most of these people.

[Megan Garber]

We don't know if they're real. We don't know. Yeah, exactly. Like, their motivation could be like, I'm a bot, you know, made by Moldova or whatever. It might be like, we just don't know. But I do think, like, the fact that, like, it's so hard to ask on screens, but also it barely even occurs to us anymore to ask, like, why are you doing, you know? So, like, I think just if we can sort of get back to, you know, it doesn't have to be an aggressive like, why are you behaving this way? But, you know, I think sometimes, like, a little curiosity can go a long way too. So that's. I love that. I'm gonna start doing that for myself, too. Thank you.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me. It's always great to chat with you. And the book is Screen People. Everyone should go read it. It's fantastic. Thank you for writing it. And come back again soon.

[Megan Garber]

Oh, please. I'd love to. Thank you so much.

[Jon Favreau]

Bye, Megan. Take care.

[Megan Garber]

Bye. Good to see you.

[Jon Favreau]

Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Ilech Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer and Anisha Banerjee is our associate producer. Audio support from Charlotte Landis. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Matt De Groat is our VP of production. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva, Eric Schutt and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos Every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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