Offline with Jon Favreau - AI News Anchors, Dems $20 Million Plan to Study Men, and Max Bids Farewell to Offline

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

To celebrate his final appearance on the pod, Max takes Jon on a trip down memory lane, sharing his favorite Offline clips from the past two years—including lessons he learned while trying to take control of his screen time, insights about loneliness in the digital age, and a touching reflection on what it means to pay attention to what you pay attention to. But first! Your favorite millennials discuss a terrifying AI model that’s likely to kick off the fake news apocalypse and the Democratic Party’s new not-so-secret secret plan to win back the support of young men (and what Democratic donors should spend their money on instead). 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. 

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And I need a skincare routine as I'm getting older because the sun is bad, aging is also bad. So I've been using one skin. And honestly it's great. You don't want to look like an old leather sofa. No, no. The next thing you know, Trump's true socialing that you look leathery.

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You can try OneSkin with 15% off using code offline at oneskin.co. That's 15% off Oneskin.co with code offline. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Give your skin the scientifically proven gentle care it deserves with OneSkin. When our country is in crisis every day, like every day is an emergency, every day is scary, but at the same time, you know that you've got to live. You've only got so many hours and days. That's what your life is. Your life is hours and days and don't give them to Trump, you know, don't give them to Mark Zuckerberg or fucking TikTok, both because that's the

only life that you have, but also because, you know, if you do care about saving democracy and fighting against Trump, then you've got to be able to be present for that. You've got to be actualized. You have to be in control of your own attention. So it's not about balancing living a happy, fulfilled present life against how to be engaged in saving our country. They're actually the same thing. I'm John Favreau. I'm Max Fisher.

Max, today is the day, your final offline taping. How you feeling? My send off before I'm launched into the sun. It's bittersweet, man. I mean, I did not know what I was getting into when I moved out here to do this with you, which was part of the appeal. It was an adventure and it was something new, but it has been so fun, so interesting.

I look forward to it every week, which is not something you usually say about a job, which I definitely am not taking for granted. And it's felt really meaningful. Like it feels really fulfilling to be doing this and very valuable for me, just personally, and I hope for people listening along. So thank you.

Thank you to you, to Emma Austin listeners for really inviting me in here and I don't know, treating me like a partner and a friend. It's nice. Well, you are a partner and a friend and thank you for everything you've brought to the show. And people ask me, what's your favorite thing to do with Crooked and Offline?

Like recording Offline every week is at the very top of the list. Oh my God, that's so nice, man. I love Offline. Oh, it means a lot to hear. Well, you know, I mean, I of course love Pod Save America. Sure. Your spin-off, which is doing better and better. I think it might take off.

But it is so much of my life, both on microphone and off, just pausing. And like the conversations that we have been able to have are just, it's different and makes you think more. And it gets out of the professional and political into like life. Right. And I've really enjoyed that.

Yeah. And I would not have been able to do it without you in Shotgun here. Thanks, man. Well, that, I mean, that realization feels like that's kind of the show. You know what I mean? Like we thought this was a new show when we,

I mean, obviously you started it well before I got here, but like when you and I were doing it and then realized that it's a show about life. And I think that's what we're realizing about politics right now and about democracy and elections is that actually both the like, diagnostically, if you wanna understand what's happening, you have to think about life,

but also just if you wanna be a good citizen and get through the week, that those are the things that really matter. Yes. Julia has been very nicely, she's been combing through the comments on YouTube and Discord. Can I read. Yes. Julia has been very nicely, she's been combing through the comments on YouTube and Discord. Can I read them for you?

Like comments reacting to me leaving. She hasn't sent me any, if there are any mean ones, she hasn't sent them to me. So as far as I know, everybody is sad that I'm going. I'll send those in a couple of weeks. That's right. I appreciate that. Quote, truly going to miss your dulcet criticisms

of John's screen time numbers and your thoughtful takes on the imminent doom we face as a two online nation. Man, I really feel seen by that comment. Someone really gets what I'm doing here. That is from Shane Rec, who added, is this what it feels like when your parents get divorced? Oh, no, it feels much different. And we're still gonna record shows

on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Also, it's not like Austin and Emma have to choose. No, they do. At the end of the show, they're gonna be picking the host and they never get to speak to the other host again. We're not even consciously uncoupling. I don't know, it's not even a... Speak for yourself, man.

Oh, that is funny. No, but you will be hearing from my divorce lawyer. Should I listen? Should I read the listener email that Austin sent us? I...no. Absolutely not. No, I hate this email.

No, it's fine. You can read it. It's fine. I shouldn't read it. It's a nice email that someone is listening to the show closely. I'm sorry that I said I hate it. I don't mean that. When I listen to the podcast, I picture Thomas Middleditch as John and Zach Woods as Max, a la Silicon Valley, the show on HBO. Sure. You haven't seen it. It seems fitting enough given the subject matter. I hope this doesn't seem unfair to you two, and I certainly don't mean it as an

insult. I think Max does sound a little like Zack Woods, and maybe if I pick the right photos I could argue John vaguely can resemble Thomas Middleditch, maybe if the lighting is right. I don't think you look like, at no disrespect to Thomas Middleditch, I don't think you look like him and no disrespect to Thomas Middleditch, I don't think you look like him. Thank you. Obviously, the subject matter also fits all things considered. Probably added to that is the dynamic between the two characters in the show.

Max slash Zack is the voice of reason, while Thomas slash John is the spastic code Pied Piper Twitter crazed main character, no offense, John. None taken. That's how when people ask me, they're like, what's Jon Favreau like? I'm always like, you know, spastic. Spastic.

I'm pretty spastic. I'm addicted to Twitter. Okay, we'll get into the show. We've put together a special show to send you off. You pulled some of your favorite clips from our conversations with various offline guests, and we're going to play them later as a way to talk about some of the big themes and lessons we've learned from doing the show together over the last two years.

But before we get there, we have a couple of news items we want to talk about, our last few news items. As ever, the news was not going to hold back for us to have an all clip show week. Last week, Twitter user at AI for success posted a truly terrifying eight-second AI video that now has nearly 6 million views. It features an extremely realistic looking news anchor sitting behind a desk reading this headline. In shocking news, JK Rowling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey. That is funny. You have to admit that it's funny. If you're listening to this in an audio only format, just go check out the clip on our

YouTube channel. It is very worthwhile. It looks like a completely 100.0% authentic news clip. Yep. I mean, it's wild. Fittingly, the tweet accompanying this video read, general population cooked. You can literally create news clips with VO3 now. What's even real anymore?

So thankfully this clip is of a random no-name news anchor, but you could easily imagine an AI model that's able to reproduce clips from CNN, the BBC, even this podcast. So Max, are we cooked? It's feeling a little cooked. It's feeling to me like this is the Jurassic Park moment for AI Deepfakes.

I can remember that scene in Jurassic Park where Jeffrey Goldblum says, you were so focused on whether you could, you didn't think about whether you should. Oh, nice. I thought you were gonna say the Raptors learned how to open the doors. It's that too, but Jeffrey Goldblum is not in that scene,

so I don't want to talk about it. That's true. That's a great line. It feels like this is something, this is Google's new VEO3-like AI video generator. The second everybody saw this, we all realized this is a terrifying crossing of the Rubicon. This is a power that people should not have to be able to make AI deep fakes of videos that look a thousand percent authentic. It's very hard to tell that you can't really tell that it's fake. It can be anything you want. Like in the past, just a context set,

when this kind of thing has come up, like a new AI fake image generator, I have of course typically taken the contrarian view and said like, it's not actually as bad as it might look because the way that misinformation works is not that it fools you by looking authentic, right? The way that it works is it appeals to some psychological need. You know, you're a big Trump fan and it's important to you psychologically to believe that he could not have possibly lost the 2020 election. And in fact, a lot of the most viral

misinformation like looks terrible and is very shoddy. It's like a, you know, shitty fake headline. So that's not white travels. And that's why I would always say like, don't actually get too hung up and how convincing it looks because that is not the main thing. But I think this is different. That is just to emphasize that I really think this is the thing that looks so convincing. It is a new kind of miss and disinformation threat

that we're facing. Yes, and I also think that some of the clips we've seen that are circulating online are funny enough and sort of not like, it's just too hard to believe that they're so over the top. Like, you know, J.K. Rowling was attacked by Orcas, right? It was like Pete Hegseth, like Pete Hegseth died after drinking a liter of vodka

in a contest with RFK Jr., right? Like it's, it makes you think it's not as bad as I think it could be. It's not showcasing the dangers. Right, like I read this piece on it in Verge and they kind of came to the conclusion like, yeah, well, if you really look and maybe you can tell and maybe it's not that bad,

but like they have an example of someone showed like the space needle in Seattle on fire, right? Like, or maybe it was a terrorist attack. So something like that comes out. It jumps to social media, reporters pick it up, and by the time they call local authorities to check and realize that it's not true,

the literal fake news is everywhere. And forget about news anchors and AI characters saying things that are shocking or not believable. Like what happens, the danger is stuff that is believable, but also very damaging. So like imagine an anchor saying, oh, president Trump says he's levying

a new 400% tariff on China and watch the markets. Right, watch the market move, which has already happened from that, like a random tweet. But there's things that could seem very believable, especially coming out of this administration because it's like there's almost no surprises from them. And I think that can get damaging really fast. I think the even greater danger than losing an ability to distinguish what's real, because I think we'll always be able to tell what's real. Like, you can always, like, check the news.

You can check against an article. I think we are going to lose the ability to distinguish what's fake. Yeah. Like, being able to say something is known as fake versus, like, contested or uncertain or, like, I've seen different clips saying different things I think is going to become harder and harder. And all of the changes in our media environment over the last 15 years kind of feel like they've been building towards something to make an AI video generator

like this as dangerous as possible. Like how do people consume news today? For the most part, it's not by reading a newspaper directly or by reading a newspaper directly or by watching TV news directly, right? It's consuming decontextualized clips that they see on Reels, Twitter, TikTok, whatever, not even posted by the original source, right? Often now they're posted by some like engagement bait

account and you just take for granted that it's real because look, that's a CNN anchor. This like looks like it's a real news clip or it looks like it reals a real event. But that is the perfect place for a fake TV news clip that would never actually happen to take purchase and circulate forever as proof of something or at least in muddying the waters of the truth

in a way that is gonna be very hard to like ever ascertain what really happened because it's like, I don't know, like you have a clip, you have a CNN clip it's like, I don't know, like you have a clip, you have a CNN clip that shows that, I don't know, ICE opened fired a bunch of immigrants, but like I have a fake CNN clip that says that actually they were opened, they were fired upon first and just returning fire. So like, who's going to say what's true? And who's right. And then there's a clip of someone saying, well, this is the right clip. And the other one was AI generated, but is that clip AI generated?

I mean, it can get pretty scary pretty fast. And also because it is, I mean, up until 20 minutes ago, if you wanted to make a fake news anchor clip, which people did, right? Like these Russian troll farms did, it took a lot of effort. You had to get anchors, you had to be able to set,

now you can do it in a few seconds. Anybody can do it. And I think that the- It's only gonna get better. It's only gonna get better. It's only gonna get better. It's only gonna get cheaper and easier. The amount of this that is about to flood all of us, I think is gonna be a big part of what is gonna make it

so hard to differentiate reality now. Like if you see one weird clip on TikTok where someone purports to say that like, Starbucks is funding the IDF, you know, like your defenses are maybe going to go up and maybe be like, I don't know if that's true or not. But if you're scrolling TikTok, you see 10 of those in a row. And they're all from people that look like their business executives who work from Starbucks

saying we're so proud to be funding the IDF. It's going to be a lot harder for those defenses to come up and you to know what's real and not. The other thing I took from this is the entertainment industry is also cooked. Yeah, I know. And again, prestige television and film probably survives for a while. Right, the top end of stuff

where you expect a certain amount of artistry. Procedurals, cartoons, kids' content, cooked. The kids' content part of it, I think, is really disconcerting because it's already getting into kind of like content mill territory. I mean, yeah, sit and watch Charlie Favre's YouTube scrolling for a little bit. There's some junk on that thing.

Is he getting a lot of CNN deepfakes mostly? No, just like the weirdest, you let it sit for like, you let it go for like five minutes, the algorithm, and some of the videos are just like, what are they doing in this video? They're playing a video game, but they're not, but they made a computer generated, I don't even know what they're talking about.

I am really glad that the WGA and SAG secured like the Hollywood contracts that they did with protections against AI, but you're right. It's just a matter of time until the like bottom 20% is flooded by this stuff. So we're all going to have to learn how to, I don't even know, differentiate it. I don't think that's possible anymore. We're all just going to have to learn how to read and understand these clips that we see knowing that there's an X percent chance that it's just fake.

Well, and certainly the social media companies are not gonna be helping. That's right. You don't think so? Silicon Valley? Act as traffic cops here, because yesterday our own Hallie Kiefer, here at Crooked, shared a TikTok with us from Ariel Lohr,

a popular beauty and wellness influencer who talks about how she came across a paid ad on Instagram that featured an unlicensed AI-generated video of her hawking skincare products on a podcast. She contacted her attorneys who sent the company running the video a cease and desist, but rather than take the ad down, they blocked her on Instagram. And then she reported the video to the fine folks at Metta who also refused to take the video down because they say the video to the fine folks at Meta, who also refused to take the video down. Of course. Because they say the video doesn't violate their community standards.

Let's play a quick clip. So I'm going to play you just a few seconds of the video so that you can see it for yourself. Looks stunning. Thank you. But come on, tell us. What's your secret? Okay, but don't go telling everyone, all right? This is my best kept secret. Deal. I promise.

Honestly, you see, it's not even that complicated. When I was younger, I had a ton of skin issues. I started noticing fine lines in my early 20s and thought, no way. So what kind of community standards allow companies to use deepfakes of trusted influencers to sell shit without their knowledge? So I checked and this actually does break Metta's rules. They changed the rules a few months ago, specifically to bar this kind of thing.

But like, you know, as we have learned time and again, they just like, they're not very good at enforcing this stuff. And it's not because they like secretly want this content. It's just because content moderation has always been an afterthought for them. It's always been kind of poorly run because the point of it, as I learned when I've reported on like the decision- making behind how they do the content enforcement,

the point of it is usually just about avoiding bad PR rather than actually making the platforms healthier. Well, then why did they, if it does violate their community standards, why do they tell her it doesn't? All of these things go through, it's not going to like the vice president of policy at Meta, it's going to someone who works at an outsourcing center who might live in like the Philippines and is like probably has a thousand of these on their desk

and they have these big rule books that are very confusing and contradictory. And they're like, they're just like any call center worker. They're just like kind of trying to get through the day to make their, you know, $4 an hour. That makes sense. Yeah. Well, that's troubling.

Because that's how much they care, which is not, I mean, like the company cares, it's not very much. But I actually think this is really important to talk about because as much as we are concerned about the implications of these AI deepfakes at like a high level for, you know, politics or propaganda or like election interference, I think a lot of the malicious uses of it that we're going to actually see day to day are going to be like, scamming, blackmailing people, character assassination, revenge foreign, selling scam products like this clip, or there's a lot of scams now

where people get a phone call from someone that claims to be like a relative and being like, oh, stuck in Europe, wire me $3,000 to get home. Imagine if... Love it keeps saying, we all need code words. like a relative and being like, oh, stuck in Europe, wire me $3,000 to get home. You know, imagine if- Love it keeps saying, we all need code words. He's right. We all need our own individual- Absolutely right. Special word that you give out to friends and family.

Which is crazy that we live in that environment where you need to prove that you are the person you say you are, and by the way, don't email that code word, but also how are you gonna get it out to people? Yeah, you have to like go up to someone and be like, looking around. What's your, what's your code word? If you have suggestions for our code words, please send them in.

Maybe we could get a sponsor to buy one of the code words, but like, imagine like, you know, your grandmother getting shown, getting emailed a video of you, like literally you being like, I'm in Paris, I can't get a flight home, here's my bank account number to wire me the money. Like, of course she's gonna send that. Yep, yep, it's terrifying. Offline is brought to you by Haya.

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and get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults. Now, you might be thinking, this kind of greedy, destructive behavior calls for some regulation. You'd be right, but unfortunately, the greedy, destructive people running Congress, they disagree. Last week, as part of their big, beautiful bill, House Republicans passed a provision that would ban states and local governments from regulating artificial intelligence for the next 10 years. The provision would affect quite a few blue states like Microsoft's home

state of Washington that have passed or are contemplating AI guardrails to protect consumers. What do you think about this? And like does this become law and is it lawful? I mean, it's crazy that this is the first, technically the first federal regulation around internet data privacy is one saying no regulation. Like for years, people have been saying, hey, you should pass a single law. And they said, okay, we've got it.

I'm not a law saying states can't pass laws. And it's not just blue states. It's a lot of red states that have AI regulations. Like Utah has a ton, including one that specifically bars the thing that we just talked about, like using deep fakes to sell products. Will it pass? You know Congress better than I do.

I did see that there were two GOP senators who expressed some opposition to it. I think it doesn't, it seems like it probably won't pass because it's a, it's a change in law and it's not a change. It's not a budgetary change, which gets kicked out of a reconciliation package. But it's interesting. The people who are for it, their argument is, look, we can't have state by state patchwork

regulations. If anything is a job for Congress, it is regulating AI on a federal level so that it's like nationwide rules that everyone understands, which is a fine argument, but then do that. Right. Because basically what they're saying, like what you could also imagine is them saying,

we do need some national standards, national regulation, national regulation, federal regulation on this. And before we can get around to doing that, states can do what they'd like. And then ultimately, if we pass something on the national level, that can sort of take precedent over all the different state regulations.

But that's not what they're doing. They're basically just like, just hold on, we're gonna get around to it, even though we can't fucking do anything in Congress. We will get around to federal regulation and until then, nothing. It's just lobbying by trade groups. It's just a giant corporate handout.

And by the way, like having state regulations for things that we buy nationally happens all the time. Like it happens with food regulations, happens with water. Like of course states can do this. There's no reason not to. Yeah. Now, speaking of political parties with silly ideas. Yeah.

The New York Times reports that donors and strategists inside the Democratic Party have been developing a new $20 million plan to win back the support of young men. The plan, the plan is codenamed... Not a good plan. SAM, which stands for Speaking with American Men. So far, so good.

And promises investment to, quote, study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces. Okay, that's less good. Among the plan's recommendations, buying ads and video games. content that gains attention and virality in these spaces. Okay, that's less good. Among the plan's recommendations, buying ads and video games. All I could think of when I read this is, careful when you approach the men in the wilderness. Call an adult.

Do not cancel them right away. Be careful not to cancel them. Listen to what they say. Do not blame them for all the society's ills. Maybe you can bring them back. Call your local 80-year-old Democratic elected official to come and speak to them on your behalf. They're trained for this. Don't scare them. Approach them carefully.

That's right. What do you make of this? Do you think it's a syntax problem? We've always said it's syntax. We've always said that on the show. I mean, just to context set, this is not actually, I think, something the Democrats are doing. It's not like the DNC is doing it. Some group somewhere is doing it. Right.

It's some group put together a proposal. They're trying to get money for it. But it does speak to what at least this one firm thinks the decision makers in the party will spend $20 million for. I mean, this is the kind of thing that you pitch if you were pitching a bunch of 70 and 80 year olds. And maybe that's the problem more so than do we understand the syntax of young men. And I should also say that like, not all of it was bad.

The one other detail they revealed about this proposal, which again, will not actually happen, was above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone. That's probably pretty good advice. Yeah. Yeah. There's just, here's my issue with it. The way that Democrats talk about winning back groups and I'm not talking about pundits like us, right? Which is fine. But like democratic politicians, party leaders, it leans way too heavily into anthropology. Like we are going to study these foreign people,

who we have no idea about. And it's funny because now it's men, right? So it's like a category we are intimately familiar with. But I'm imagining like, is this how Democrats sound to rural voters, to independent voters, swing voters, people who switch back and forth between parties, people who decide they don't wanna vote because they don't think it's important.

It's not just a moralizing tone tone though there's some of that. It's a like, we are here on high trying to dissect them. The magic formula to win you back. We're just going to talk and talk about it. And like Republicans don't do that. They just do the thing that they believe is going to win the voters back. Well, I mean, what could be a clearer way to signal that the party leadership considers quote unquote men, which we know of course actually refers to specific subsets of men

to be something that is separate from the Democratic coalition and outside of it, whereas the Republican coalition has learned to- Half the population. Right. Slightly less than half. Slightly less than half. Slightly less than half. It would be a good block to get, I would say. But I think the, to your point, the Republican party has learned to speak to these men in a way that sounds like they are talking to each other because they are natively part

of, now I sound like an anthropologist, natively part of the population. And that's why I think that the issue is not, do the 80-year-olds in party leadership have the right talking points for knowing how to, quote unquote, speak to men? It's the fact that they are from a totally alien group to the people that they're trying to get as voters. I do think it's a party leadership problem in my eyes.

And it's also a, I mean, it's an education issue too. It's like very highly educated people using syntax and language. Forget it, it's not that like the men are the issue here. It's the elites in the party who do not talk and act like or have contact with or know what the lives of these voters are like, whether it's men, whether it's rural voters, whether it's whatever. And there are stereotypes and there are, you know, of what these voters are like that everyone

traffics in that I just think are not necessarily helpful. I do think there is also, I mean, just to like kind of level set, like how, you know, how to think about this, like part of it, like reading between the lines, it feels like this is kind of more a pitch for trying to get donors to hand over money. Like these are plans that exist to solicit donations rather than the plans that exist to be implemented. There's also, it made me especially- There's one group of people who are silly enough to part with a lot of money based on

shit like this. I mean, it's donors, especially liberal donors. I mean, conservative donors out there, they also, they just kind of want to be like indulged in like culture war too. Yeah. Oh yeah. They have a different set of problems, much more damaging. But it made me like, especially that line about like, you know, above all, avoid a moralizing

tone. It made me think about this thing that happened when I first got hired at the Times, which is the guy who had hired me also brought in around the same time this outside consulting firm to do this like huge investigation. It was basically the same thing. It was like, how do we get young readers? Why don't we have young readers? Why are they all watching their MTV and reading their Vice News?

And I did an interview with one of these, like, many very high-priced consultants, and the questions that they asked me were so stupid and obvious, it was like, should you use social media to promote your work as a reporter? Or like, what do you think? Should we put articles on the website, too? Should they go on the Internet before the newspaper comes out? And I went and talked to the guy who had hired me and brought in this firm. And I was like, these guys you hired are idiots.

Like, why did you hire them? What are you doing? And he was like, look, we knew exactly what they were gonna tell us before we even hired them. We knew what the report was gonna say. Like, writers should have more voice, you know, engage with readers more. Like, don't do he said, she said. He said the point of bringing them in was not that we thought we were going to learn something,

it was to force internal change, which is very hard to do internally. And you need this kind of outside report to tell you like, you have to do this thing differently to like end the internal debate. So maybe I'm being overly optimistic. No, because that happens in politics. I mean, I'm sure any big institution. This is why consultants get hired. Right. So you things you already know. Luke Winkie had a great piece in Slate last week about why it's so embarrassing to watch

Democrats try to find a liberal Joe Rogan, writing, you simply cannot concoct Joe Rogan's brain chemistry through the fires of consulting, which is to say that Rogan's rise is a product of the ebbing cultural tide rather than its author. Unfortunately, the donors scraping vast tranches of cash into the coffers of libed up Twitch streamers will likely be the last people to figure that out. It's devastating. It's a great line. Winky then offers a very funny list of alternative ideas Democrats can try to win back young men, including a Daft Punk reunion tour, Ezra Klein-style abundance policy for the deregulation and availability of original Formula 4 loco, and an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fortnite skin. I'd pay anything, whatever the price is. What was your favorite suggestion from the piece?

I mean, obviously the one that was written to troll you specifically. People who have read the piece already know what I'm talking about. Quote, the addition of Luigi Mangione to the Crooked Media Podcast Network first guest, Sydney Sweeney or Bernie Sanders. Sydney Sweeney or Bernie Sanders killed me. So funny. Am I the only one who fucking read Luigi Mangione's Reddit history? His first guest is not Sydney Sweeney, it's Ezra Klein. It's Jonathan Haidt. Luke Sweeney, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York

Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York

Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New Luigi just like 40% overlap with our guest list, which is again, a very funny troll of you specifically. But I bring up Luigi because of course it's the perfect transition for you to reveal my

replacement. Luigi Manjari. Direct from Zooming for Prison. That is right. Yeah, I said I didn't want to do remote for a co-host, but with Luigi I'll make a guitar show. He's a star, no I get it. Yeah, absolutely.

It was funny that Luke in this piece wrote, these ideas, these suggestions are mostly the result of a brainstorm in my dudes only group chat, which is composed primarily of other Obama voting 30 something boyfriends and husbands, none of whom is Ivy league educated. That gives us some authority, right? I don't work, where can we find one of those?

Except for the 30 something, I'm there. I don't listen, 40 is the new 30 something. That's exactly right. Anyway, I thought that was pretty funny. All right. Before we jump to break, some quick housekeeping. On June 6th, Love It is teaming up with the Bullwerks Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell for Free Andri, a fundraiser at World Pride hosted by Cricket Media

and the Bullwerks at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C. The show will be like a Love It or Leave It, the Bullwerks podcast crossover live event, which means great conversations and probably some fun insults thrown between Lovett and Tim. Hopefully Sarah gets to say a few words. Poor Sarah. They're going to be celebrating pride and most importantly, raising money for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, the group representing makeup artist and actor, Andres Hernandez

Romero and others who disappeared to El Salvador without due process. Before the live show, Votes of America will join forces with the human rights campaign for a protest at the U.S. Supreme Court to bring more attention to this important cause. It'll be a big gay DC live show for a great cause. Get your tickets and RSVP for the protest at cricket.com slash events. When we come back, Max and I are going to talk through some of our favorite offline moments. Offline Moments. Offline is brought to you by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

It is our right as Americans to choose how or if we worship. But here's the thing, not everyone is cool with this shift. A lot of political folks who call themselves Christian nationalists, they're working overtime to insert their beliefs into our laws, our schools, and even our personal lives. That's where the Freedom From Religion Foundation comes in. They fight to keep church and state separate,

like our founders actually intended. So if you believe in keeping organized religion out of government, FFRF has your back, join them. Go to ffrf.us slash freedom, or text offline to 511-511 and become a member today or text offline to 511-511 and become a member today. Text offline to 511-511 or go to ffrf.us slash freedom because the only thing worse than someone forcing religion

on you is when they do it by law. For membership information, text offline to 511-511, text fees may apply. All right, Max, when we first started talking about how we wanted to close out your final episode on this podcast, you mentioned you wanted to talk through some of the big themes of the show and check in to see if we're actually living any of the lessons we've learned.

Absolutely not. Spoiler, no. Yeah, not at all. So today, you've pulled a couple of your favorite clips from the show, which we're going to play and then discuss. Kicking us off, I believe, is a clip from the Offline Challenge. So, there's this thing. I always like to pitch it to men over 30.

It's called... I'm barely over 30. ...therapy. It's great. I thought that's what this was. It's great. No, no, this is a podcast. This is a podcast. It kind of feels like therapy.

Famously, a lot of you guys mistake the two, but it's okay. But who am I? I'm just another podcast hoax. I'm just calling balls and strikes. That's all you're doing. That's all I'm doing. I'm just calling balls and strikes.

I would like if at the end of this, our big hack for everyone for how to treat your smartphone addictions get a podcast. Yeah. Yeah, get a podcast. And that is... Get your podcast and then keep your phone in the other room while you're hosting the podcast. Exactly. Dumpy. Prostrate. Can I just say she was wrong? This podcast is 100% therapy.

I know. I know. As we are about to cover. As we are about to cover. Jokes aside, we're gonna play a related clip from our conversation with Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up with Your Phone, who helped us out along with Caroline Dumphy, who you just heard, with the offline challenge. Let's listen.

For me, I think that one of the most powerful takeaways for myself that really solidified this is the observation that ultimately our lives are what we pay attention to and meaning that you know Whatever you're paying attention to that's what you're actually going to experience in the moment And that's what you're gonna remember and that means anytime we're making a moment-to-moment decision about where to direct our attention We're actually making this broader decision of how to live our lives And I think that's something that you both have been touching on in your conversations over the past month

about this in different ways. But to me, that's been so powerful. I actually had a bracelet made for myself that says pay attention. And that's like my version of a tattoo. Like I don't want to commit to a tattoo, but I'll wear a bracelet. But it's a reminder that like that's what's at stake.

We're going to die and we have the chance right now to live. We are going to die. Actually, right before we recorded, Emma pointed out to me, she was like, two of these clips reference dying? You worried about what message that's gonna send to listeners? So just to be clear, I am not dying. No, no, Max is not dying.

Just moving to New York. I'm not dying, but we all are gonna die. So that's important to talk about. As you leave the show, how has your relationship with your phone changed? So something that Catherine Price really helped me understand, and something that we have subsequently talked a lot about, and like Chris Hayes wrote a whole book about,

is that this war to reclaim our like minutes and hours of our day through our attention that Silicon Valley is trying so hard to take away from us and steal from us. It's not just a personal wellness issue and it's not just a happiness issue, although it's definitely that. It's also foundational to the loneliness epidemic, to social atomization into our country's veer into distrust, far right politics, division.

Authoritarianism. Right, it is literally, I think, a front and one of the most important fronts is crazy is that idea initially sounded in the fight to save our democracy. And that's like, I think seeing that and seeing that it's really important to retake your attention from your fucking phone, I think is one of the big things that got me to really take it seriously. I have a few lessons for us that I feel like putting together all of the different

challenges we did, the little studies we ran to manage my own relationships on my screen. Okay, I have two foundational tips everyone should follow, two expert level tips, and then two top tier tips for the screen time Kung Fu masters who actually achieve Nirvana. Oh no, I'm excited. It's definitely not me. I'm somewhere between foundational Kung Fu masters. Wow. Actually like achieve Nirvana. Oh no, I'm excited. It's definitely not me. I'm like somewhere between foundational, extra level. Okay.

Foundational, number one, your phone goes in the other room overnight. Or like, I know you can because you've got like baby monitor stuff, but like the other side of the room, just like away from your hands overnight. So easy, changes your life, huge. And the other, and this is from Katherine Price, is when you catch yourself scrolling, ask yourself what impulse you are chasing in that moment. Like, what is the emotional need that you are trying and almost certainly failing to fulfill by scrolling on your phone?

And once you think about that, it's always like, scrolling TikTok is not easing my anxiety about the world. You know, it's not easing the fact that I'm tired, whatever. So I'm going to go do something else that will actually address that. Expert level, walks, walks every day. No phone, no headphones, or phone in the back pocket, whatever.

And the other one- Just raw dog and a walk. Just raw dog and a walk, that's right. As Mark Zuckerberg would say, probably many times in a row, very awkwardly. The other is, do you remember the Maggie Hammerman posting rule? I forgot what it was now. I love this. I love this rule. So, okay, this is about when you determining when you should post on any public facing social media. I'm not talking about

like Instagram among friends, but like post on Twitter, post on TikTok. Ask yourself, does this need to be posted? Does it need to be posted by me? Now, you're one of the few people because you for some reason have the year of JD Vance and Elon Musk. Like, sometimes it does need to be posted by you because I don't get responses from those guys. But for the rest of us, 99% of the time, you're going to realize, actually, I don't need to post that. And by posting it, I'm just like spinning myself up, I'm chasing engagement, whatever.

Okay, now the real master level tips, the absolute like levitating five feet above the ground, black and white screen, all the time. It's too hard. It's hard. I go off and on. I hate it. I'm off of it right now. That's why it works.

And the other one, I can't remember who gave us this. It might've been Katherine Price. Put a Post-It note over your phone and just write on the Post-It note like, screen time or no, or do you need to look at this? I did that for months, it was great. Do you know what our screen time numbers got back to? I was listening back to these offline challenge episodes.

Do you know what you were at when it ended? No. 45 minutes a day. How did I do that? I don't know, but you did it for like weeks, weeks in a row. I'm so, I've really backslid. Don't you miss those extra four hours?

My big lesson from this is, and this is not a cop out or to try to excuse my behavior at all. My this is not a cop out t-shirt. But, and a number of guests have said this to us, it really is so much more than about individual willpower. Totally. Like there are structural constraints and incentives

that make it quite addictive. Right. People can debate, is it a classic addictive thing, like alcohol or whatever, but it is addictive. And so try as I have to like, and I do a whole show about it, you know, to keep some of these habits or tips that you mentioned. It is very, very difficult.

I do think that I have found most success in at the very least clocking in my own mind when I am scrolling for no reason. The point about intention, right? Like what am I looking for? And what is the need that I'm trying to satiate with my online behavior right now? And I don't obviously always think about that all the time, but when I do, it doesn't necessarily like take me off my phone, but it's like, okay, well I'm gonna go look for an article about this or this piece of news that I'm actually interested

in or I'm going to text a friend or I'm going to do whatever or I'm like looking for some kind of connection that I'm not getting. And sometimes I can fix that, sometimes I can't, but just the act of clocking it and being more intentional about how you're using your phone has helped me a little bit. Totally. And I think it's a good point about how many things are structurally engineered against us, the fact that this is where all the socializing happens, where all the information is.

So I think you can be forgiving with yourself about your, and I'm speaking to listeners, not just to you, but you can be forgiving to yourself with your ability to actually get the screen time numbers down, but maybe try to be strict with yourself about just being aware in your own mind of what you're doing and why you're doing it in the moment. And that will actually did a lot of the work done for you.

It does. I believe the next clip you pulled for us is from my recent interview with Lauren Greenfield, who directed the excellent FX docu-series Social Studies. Let's play that clip. That's what happened in our group discussions. Like at first it's like, wait, I don't have my phone. But then they really loved it and they talked about that. And I think when everybody doesn't have it, it creates new ways of communicating.

And actually what they said at the end, they brought up the, they said, we all wanna be our phones. It's so great to talk to each other. But they brought up the new existential question. Do you exist if you're not on social media? And they were like no people forget about you. So that's the catch-22 is like if You're the only one off of it

It is kind of too punitive because it takes you outside of social life, which is hard for a teenager What do you think has this has this show made you more or less hopeful for future generations who are growing up with the Internet smartphones? It's an interesting way to put it. Kind of both. I definitely feel like this is something I am still on the cusp of fully understanding. It feels like we are just kind of starting to get the picture of what these phones and the Internet mean for teens right now. And every time I hear something, I'm surprised.

Every time I learn something new, I think, there's a lot I still have to learn about this picture. It definitely makes me more concerned for them because I'm also constantly learning ways that this is distorting for them that I never even thought of, but also more optimistic because one thing that I took away from this interview, from the social studies documentary, and from like every focus group you hear from teens is who is sounding the alarm about this? It's the teens. It's the kids in school who are saying like, hey, these phones are really bad for us.

We're aware of it. We're all like they're talking about it to each other, which is really impressive. I don't know if I would have had the wherewithal to have that kind of conversation with my peers when I was 14, but it's important, I think, to kind of stay connected to the fact that like, this is not like the, I don't know, the rap panic of the 90s where it's like concerned parents

trying to take their phones away. Like, do you know how fucking bad something has to be for teens to tell grownups, take this thing away from us? It's really dangerous for us. And I think when we hear it's bad for you, I think the examples that pop up for people who do not study this stuff like we do are a lot of harms we've talked about,

which is like violence or sex or things that the kids shouldn't be seeing on their phones and sort of bullying, right? All this kind of stuff. But there is, I think, maybe the most pernicious effect of being on your phone all the time is also hardest to measure, and it's a little more subtle, which is like if our children are growing up

at a developmentally critical time in their lives and they are mediating their relationships and their development and their academic growth through screens instead of with other human beings. You are losing something critical about what it means to be a human being. Yeah. And I worry most about just the sheer volume of time that you are just on a screen growing up and not dealing with someone else because I think screens are fundamentally anti-social.

Anti-social and not just in the loneliness sense, but like the relationships you make online are not the same as the relationships you have. Even the best form of relationship you can have online, which is texting, direct messaging with one other person, you still are missing their emotions, their facial, reactions to what you're saying to them. It's just not the same.

Neurologically, you don't experience it the same way. Neurologically, and that's the best version, but that's clearly not what's happening. And there's a lot of, I mean, we've talked, and AI is gonna make this worse, right? That you're gonna start having relationships with chatbots. And it's just, I really want my kids to just grow up in a world where they have these in-person relationships

and they are spending plenty of time with their friends, with us, Emily and I, with other human beings, with their teachers, and not just sitting for hours and hours by themselves on screens. Yeah, you have an innate biological need to look at other human faces and interact with them. And I think that's something that we are becoming aware of partially because we are losing, we're no longer having that need fulfilled. I mean, the good news is that there are a number of cities, states, school districts that are banning phones in schools.

So I think that we are gonna learn a lot and get a lot of data about the difference between, what it means for you as a kid to spend a lot of time on a phone versus not spend a lot of time on a phone. I think that will be very demonstrative for people. And I think that we are living through the backlash right now, or at least the beginnings of the backlash.

I'm not hopeful that if we just sit back and do nothing, the backlash will happen on its own. But I do think there is an opportunity now, and especially there's an opportunity for millennial parents because Gen X parents and older didn't really have the experience of knowing how damaging phones and screen time can be. We all do, because we have partially lived through it. Gen Z is going to be living through it even more.

So as they become parents too, they'll like... So I do think the opportunity for a backlash to this is there, but it's going to take people to actually, you know, make some noise about it. Yeah. Well, it's one of the things that I am excited to listen to this show for, especially, is both tracking how that backlash continues to play out and also just what we learn about kids and teens' experience on phones. Yeah, for sure.

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All right, this next clip is from another popular offline theme that we touched on earlier, the relationship between the right and masculinity. A couple months ago, you talked to the Rolling Stones Jack Crosby about the UFC and Trumpism. Let's play that clip. The right wing has successfully been able to present a definition of masculinity in this country that involves sort of the constant threat of an ability to inflict violence. They have created a world in which everyone is coming to take from you and things that scare you or frighten you are out there. They're projecting this on to the athletes that they're seeing.

And when you get that in such a distilled fashion in terms of fighting, it's like you go in there, you're rooting for your guy and your guy wins, he like slips outside of that jab, comes back with a right cross and it lands flush and the other guy just goes out like a light. You see him just crumple. You're projecting everything that's wrong in your life onto that moment, right?

And there's a feeling of when you see the right guy go down, in your mind, the right guy get hit and get punished, get knocked out, there's a sense of like that catharsis and justice where it's just like, you know, oh, for that little second, right? The guy who was fighting for me, he won and all is right in the world. As you leave this show, do you think you finally understand the Manosphere? I actually do feel like this is one of the things where my thinking has most changed and where between talking to Jack and listening to your conversations with people like Hasan Piker, I've really come to understand something I didn't before, which is the why the kind of Trump-coded, UFC, Man-is-Fear world content is speaking so powerfully to a lot of men who are otherwise not

particularly engaged in politics. And like Jack said, it is politics as combat and catharsis, not in the sense of like, oh, I want a guy who'll like fight for me, but in the sense of I want someone who will dominate and humiliate others on my behalf in a way that I can kind of vicariously identify with that will make me feel strong and powerful. And now instead of me being the one who feels pushed around

by the world, I'm the one pushing others around through this politician or this fighter who I follow. I'm the one who's in charge. You know, I'm the one taking what I want instead of having things taken from me. So to me, what kind of the Manosphere has come to mean politically is this kind of feedback loop between sports, podcasts, media, Trump,

that is very effective at both creating and then fulfilling a desire for violent catharsis and domination. Yes, and it's so closely intertwined with grievance politics, which is the politics of the right today. I mean, in some ways it has been for quite a while, but like especially in the Trump era. And I think young men, especially growing up today,

you know, they live in a world where a lot of people tell them that they're the problem and a lot of men's behavior is the problem. But if you don't necessarily feel privileged in other ways, or you don't recognize your privilege or that your gender gives you, but you're like, well, I still can't get a job, I can't provide for my family, everything feels fucked up, people are telling me that I suck, that my generation, you know, and I don't really know where to go from here.

Then someone come along and say like, well, all the people that are annoying, if you can't be helped at the very least, we can hurt the people that you don't like. Right. And there's a story that a lot of men have heard that, we used to be quote unquote, we used to be in charge, you used to be in charge,

but now because of all this bullshit, Lib equality, you had to give that up. And there's people and there's some nefarious agenda behind that. And that's the political narrative that gets assigned to it. But I do think that on a basic human evolutionary level, I think there is a real, like I think this is an uncomfortable lesson of a Luigi Mangione craze,

is that there is a deep human desire for politics of hurting people. And that may show up, and it does show up, I think, more in men than in women. Totally. But it is not necessarily confined to one gender. I mean, this is a, look, the human animal is kind of fucked up, and we have like our higher angels, we have things about us that are not great, and this is one thing that our politics forever and ever have kind of had an unspoken agreement

not to indulge, right? Like we don't have public executions in the town square. There's this kind of consensus among the party's political establishment that it's not good to chase people's votes on their desire to see other people hurt on their behalf. And that is broken down. And broken down specifically with the GOP,

which has learned to capitalize on this because the party institution collapsed. And that has put them, which has learned to capitalize on this because the party institution collapsed. And that has put them, and the lessons from this, I don't really know what to take from, but they have exclusive access to the grievance to the point of inflicting violence on your enemies vote. And that's a big vote. And one of the many ways that I think the internet error we live in plays into this is by dehumanizing people. Totally. And just making it seem like the person

you are attacking online or the video you see of someone being hurt, it's not real. I mean, you know it's real, but it's not happening to someone across the table from you. it's not happening to someone across the table from you. It's not happening to someone in your life. Right. And so you can be removed from the violence or the hatred, uh, by having it on the screen instead of in real life. And therefore it's more fun to indulge. You can mock it. You can not care that someone killed someone else, that someone got deported for no reason. That's okay.

You get all the emotional upside, but none of the actual damage to your human psyche. Yes, and that I think can lead to some very dangerous places. Yeah. You also pulled this clip from an otherwise fun conversation we shared with YouTuber Simone Yetch about puzzles.

Let's listen. I remember going to this YouTuber who Karen puzzles, she just makes puzzle videos, like jigsaw puzzle videos. And she was having a launch party. Well, she has to, I remember going to this YouTuber who Karen Puzzles, she just makes puzzle videos, like jigsaw puzzle videos, and she was having a launch party for one of her puzzles. Well, if she has to, because her name is Karen Puzzles. I know, I know, I know. That's what she did with that.

It was like maybe 10 people, and she brought in a bunch of puzzles, 10 people in a bar, just sitting working on a jigsaw puzzle. And it was so lovely in the sense that it took all pressure off of keeping a conversation. Yeah. It made it so not awkward to remain silent. I also like broke up with somebody or we were breaking up if we were working on a Lego set during like the breakup conversation, which also like in retrospect ended up being a really nice way because it added this natural breaking point of the conversation. Like it gave us a choice to enter the conversation in and out.

And I think that like, it's so hard to like be like, we're going to hang out or we're going to keep a conversation. Like, I just want to be side by side with somebody. This is a great clip because I think it captures many of the discussions we've had about loneliness on this pod as well as the choice we're all constantly making between spending time on our devices or time with actual people. How have your thoughts on loneliness in the digital age changed since you joined? I mean, I think this clip kind of speaks to how I think about it now, where a year ago, two years ago, if you would have asked me about the loneliness epidemic, I would have

talked about like the extreme edge cases. I would have said, oh, it's people who spent their childhood in the pandemic and lockdown didn't learn how to socialize. It's people who spend 20 hours a day on video games. And what I've come to understand from talking to people like Derek Thompson and others, is that the loneliness epidemic is not actually a loneliness epidemic per se. It's a socially isolation.

It's a voluntary social isolation epidemics. People choosing it and ending up feeling the effects of loneliness, even if they don't clock that they're feeling. They don't clock that that's why they feel anxious, why they feel angry or isolated. And the reason that that's happening is because it's just our environment now. It is just easier day to day to just choose, you know, you've got an endless world of content on your phone and algorithms just for you.

That's so addictive. You've got food delivery and like socializing is so fun and rewarding, but it can also feel a little taxing. Well into the flip side of it's so much easier to do it on your phone. It's so much harder now for so many people to do it in real life because we've been on our phones and screens and it's so easy to do that, that you end up, it just becomes, if you're sitting with someone, this is why someone's example was so great about like either building the Legos when you're breaking up with someone or the puzzles. Because, and I do think it's going to be important,

and especially these younger generations, to find ways to allow people to be with each other and socialize, where it's not so much pressure that it's just like two people sitting at a table with no external stimulants to like help the conversation go. Like I think those suggestions are good because we want more people to be speaking with each other, seeing each other in person, hanging with each other, but we want to facilitate it in a way that we might not have had to before because everyone now is so used to just mediating all of our relationships through technology.

Right. It's like in-person socializing needs a really sharp marketing team. Like they need, it needs someone to come in and say like you are losing the work of people's attention because you're not giving people enough dopamine, you're not giving the like popcorn stimulus that they get from everything else, which to your point is why, part of why it's so great to like have an activity that like you click together little Lego pieces, whatever, but also that takes the burden of it down a little bit, makes it a little bit less emotionally taxing.

Like Derek talked about how so much of the isolation that we're experiencing is not people who like don't have relationships and don't know how to break out of it. It's just people, it's all of us making these day-to-day choices about like, I'm going to stay home because it's easier because having dinner with someone feels like too much work. There's actually a name for the kind of activity Simone was describing, forward-facing activities. If you heard this.

Yeah, because it's like you're with somebody, but you're both facing forward because you're working on a puzzle, you're in a kickball league, you know, you're in like a cycling group, whatever. Yeah. I do think the one place that I have improved a lot, especially with regard to the phone, is in group settings with other people who I'm socializing with. Like, you know, like so we had two couples over Monday for Memorial Day and their kids,

and I think in the two, three hours they were there, I like didn't look at my phone at all. That's great. Just didn't, because I'm just like, I'm with people. And at dinner too, I'm much better at dinner now with my own family to just like put the phone in the other room. Yeah.

That part I'm doing. It's the time, the screen time is really adding up when I'm just with me. That's the hardest part. That's the hard part. No, that is the hardest part is those minutes and days. By the way, that does make you lonely too. Yeah.

No, absolutely. Because it is, again, we've talked about this. It's the illusion of connection, which is the big problem with technology. Well, and also if you've got four and a half hours a day, you could be spending that seeing some people. I could. I could. And I would like to.

People other than Elon Musk. Does anyone want to hang out? Yeah. Yeah. Finally. Yeah, email offline at crooked.com if you wanna hang out with John. I'm losing Max, I'm losing a friend right now, so. I need some more. Again, I'm not dying.

I know. I'm losing a friend, I'm sorry about that. All right, you wanted to close us out with this clip from your interview with Jenny Livingston, a woman who blogs about living with cystic fibrosis, who wrote about what she learned about life and her relationships when a miracle drug extended her expected lifespan from 25 years to 80 years. Let's listen.

To have had such a close relationship with death through the loss of my sister and my friends, contemplating my own death. I think really it gives someone the opportunity to just really, really embrace life. And I have done that so good. And I don't want to stop. I don't want to forget what that felt like to be in the trenches. And now I have more opportunity and more freedom to kind of explore life and to be bothered by the small things. And I don't want to forget, you know, where I came from.

Like, I just really love that perspective that I have. What do you do to kind of help keep yourself focused on that? This is kind of a funny thing. I literally have an app on my phone that five times a day sends me a text message saying, remember, you're gonna die. And then you open it up and it has this quote.

And sometimes it's kind of silly. Sometimes the quotes are like beautiful pieces of poetry about life and death. Sometimes it's comical, sometimes it's very dark, but yeah, it's an app that five times a day, randomly, will just be like, bing, you're gonna die, remember? This is something I practice intentionally, but I also think it's just kind of inherently who I am

or who I have become. And so a little reminder, just a deep breath even, and like, whoo, like this is a really beautiful moment. Like cherish this moment or this totally doesn't matter. Let it go. You know, I think I have become pretty good at doing that naturally,

but sometimes a text message from an app reminding you you're going to die can also be a good way to like come back down to earth. All right, Max, why did you want to close us out with this reminder that we are going to die? Yeah, it didn't need to be kind of a macabre, I mean, it's supposed to be uplifting, I don't know. No, I think it is quite uplifting.

Okay, I love talking to her, it was so fun. I mean, one of the great challenges I think we is quite uplifting. Okay, I love talking to her. It was so fun. I mean, one of the great challenges I think we're all facing right now, and that like in some ways all of the discussions about is how to live an actualized fulfilled life that is present and that is to our values at a time when our attention and what we think and how we behave is being pulled at more and more

by these giant trillion dollar tech companies. And you know, when our country is in crisis every day, like every day is an emergency, every day is scary. But at the same time, you know that you've got to live. You've only got so many hours and days. That's what your life is. Your life is hours and days and don't give them to Trump. You know, don't give them to Mark Zuckerberg or fucking tick tock, both because that's the only life that you have, but also because, you know, don't give them to Mark Zuckerberg or fucking TikTok, both because that's the only life that you have, but also because, you know, if you do care about saving democracy and fighting against Trump, then you've got to be able to be present for that.

You've got to be actualized. You have to be in control of your own attention. So it's not about balancing living a happy, fulfilled present life against how to be engaged in saving our country. They're actually the same thing. Yeah. I think. I, for a very long time, just thought a lot about death and was like terrified of death. Really?

And, oh yeah. And then I've come to learn that trying to avoid it or freak out about it, neither are helpful or do anything or change the reality of it. And so the only way to grapple with the fact that that's going to happen is to look around and start appreciating. I mean, it sounds so cliche and simple and it's so much harder to do, especially in the digital age, but is to be like, all right, that's out there somewhere.

I can't control that. What I can control is what I'm doing with the hours that I have right now and with the days that I have right now and with the relationships I have right now. And when I'm doing, what I'm doing is I'm going through the day, am I, you know, am I making the most of it?

Am I doing something that I feel is either satisfying to me or we'll have some kind of, and you know, we're politically minded, we'll have some kind of impact on the world around me. And I even think about that with the stuff I do in politics or with the stuff I do in the show or even with the tweets, right? Like, is this going to have potentially some impact?

Is it gonna maybe change someone's mind? Is it gonna- So much pressure to put on yourself though. That's just my crazy personality. But I think that part of what I took from this is that you do have to think about what is what is going to bring a happy life for you too. Yeah. That's that's I think just as

important. It is and it's hard to I think for a lot of us who are like type A personalities into politics. It's true. You're a lot to think about. Is this doing is this accomplishing a task? Is this accomplishing a task? Which again technology amplifies that feeling right? That like we have to be more productive, we have to accomplish more, we have to do more. We can get to the end of the internet, we can get to the end of the Twitter feed, right? We can consume, if we just get more information.

Get all the charts. If we just learn more and get more information, we will solve the problem. Send enough tweets. Send enough tweets, right? Where there's always a way to solve the problems and sometimes there's not a way to solve the problems. Sometimes the thing you have to do

is just live a happy life in that moment for that moment and that is one of the things that like I think about the conversation with Jenny a lot and about the lessons she learned from the time in her life when she thought she only had a few years, the lessons that she'd learned from when she got this miracle drug and all of a sudden she got another half century, like what does that feel like? And she had this kind of experience that I try to reconnect with a lot because most of us will never have it of having to suddenly decide all at once and as an adult, like having the decision literally put to her, what kind of life do you want to lead?

Because she thought she was not going to have it and all of a sudden she's got these 50 years. Who do you want to be? What do you want to do at that time? And something that I found so striking and so powerful is how much energy she puts towards staying connected to the part of herself before this drug when she thought that she was going to die much younger than she is now and the value that she has in knowing who she wants to be in that moment, rather than thinking about

what's the bigger thing I'm trying to do or what's the thing happening a year from now or 10 years from now that being connected to, I mean, she would talk about it in like her relationships with her family. She was like, she had the best relationships with everyone in her family because she really fucking valued those relationships.

Because she thought, you know, I only have so much time with this person, which is of course true for all of us, but she knew it in a way that most of us do not know it in any given moment. And I think that knowing that even if, you know, it sounds kind of hokey to say like, remember you're gonna die,

so value your time with each other. Like being present is, have to be present to have the hours, have the minutes and make them as good as they can be. And that will take care of the bigger stuff. I really think it will. It also sounds very cliche and maybe generate some eye rolls,

would have for me before I had kids, but like having kids has taught me or it's helped me live in that moment more. Just like the other day, Teddy can now sort of like crawl up on the chair in my office and he crawled up on the chair in my office and he took the pillow, throw a pillow on the chair and he threw it on the ground and I laughed and then he saw me laugh and then he went

and he picked it up again and he threw it off again and I left and then he started laughing. And he can't say many words, he can say like five words. Sure. But then for like 15 minutes straight, the two of us just played this game where all that happened was he'd take the pillow, throw the pillow, I'd laugh, he'd laugh,

and then he's laughing and I'm laughing and I'm like. That's beautiful. That's life. That's what it is. And it's so funny because during that time, what fell away was like, how long are we going to do this? What should we do next?

Is anyone else, am I supposed to be doing something else? And I thought like, oh, I'll remember this forever. This little moment of like the first time my youngest son is like really just laughing his ass off with me. And I was like, that's the kind of shit that you don't, I wouldn't have appreciated that before I'd necessarily had kids. And you know, there's other things

that will make you realize that as well. But it was, those moments are starting to be making me realize like, oh, that's how you live life. That's what life is composed of, yeah. And it's even more important to remember at the times when we feel so many other things tugging at us, telling us not to be present, but to be, you know, in our phones or on the news.

Can I go out with a piece of advice that I related on our election episode, but I say it to people all the time. So this is some secondhand advice that I got. This came from a friend whose parents grew up in Argentina and my friend asked her parents, you know, what is your advice? Because Trump had just been reelected, of course,

and her advice was, how do I get through this? Because you went through something terrible and like, I don't know how similar it will turn out to be or not be, but this military junta that took over Argentina. And she said, Antonia, you have to stay fabulous. And I think that that's great advice. And if there's anything I want the listeners of offline

to remember for Max, it's staying fabulous. I love that. That is a great place to end. Perfect. We love you, Max. We're gonna miss you so much. I'm gonna miss you guys too. And hopefully I'll be back.

Yes, we have to come back. Okay. Because it's not a goodbye forever. Give a fabulousness reinjection. Yes, we need you to come back because it's not a goodbye forever. Give a fabulousness reinjection. Yes, we need you to come be fabulous. Thank you so much. We wish you and Julia all the best and we will miss you so much and thank you for lending your brilliance to the show.

And you know what? This show is fucking therapy. Dumpy was right. This is a great session. We're each other's therapist and all the rest of you have to listen to it. And we do take healthcare. All right, everyone. Thanks, Max.

Cheers. As always, if you have comments, questions or guest ideas, email us at offline at crooked.com. And if you're as opinionated as we are, please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. For ad free episodes of Offline in Pod America exclusive content and more. Join our friends at the pod subscription community at crooked.com slash friends. And if you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the offline with john Favreau YouTube channel. Don't forget to follow crooked media on Instagram, and more. from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Segland. Dallon Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer,

and Adrienne Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Music Music Music Music