Offline with Jon Favreau - Jon Gets Hacked, Woke Offline Pope, and How Jia Tolentino’s Brain Finally Broke

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror and staff writer at the New Yorker, joins Offline to discuss how it’s becoming harder and harder to make sense of reality, especially with AI taking over our feeds. She and Jon talk about how online distrust bleeds into life offline, parenting in this moment of endless horrors, and the inspiration (or lack thereof) behind her latest essay, "My Brain Finally Broke." But first! Jon’s X account may have gotten hacked, but even a crypto scam couldn't stop him from getting his social media fix. Then, he and Max dig into Trump’s attacks on the U.S. Copyright Office, and the concerns it raises over the material AI companies are using to train their models. Finally, the guys explain how the new pontiff has come out against the technology, and why “Leo” is an homage to the last pope to preside over an industrial revolution.

Offline is brought to you by Quince. You know when a new shirt just becomes your go-to? That's what will happen when you pick up a few new pieces from Quince. They'll be the first things you reach for in your closet, lightweight, comfortable, and always on point. Quince has all the things you actually want to wear like organic cotton silk polos, European linen beach shorts, and comfortable pants that work for everything from backyard hangs to nice dinners. The best part, everything with Quince is priced 50 to 80 percent less than what you'd find at similar brands by working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middleman. Quince gives you luxury pieces without the crazy markups. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible

manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. Love Quince? Picked up some t-shirts there for the summer. Look great. Super comfy. Highly recommend. Elevate your closet with Quince. Go to quince.com slash offline for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash offline to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash offline.

Not that I remember any single thing that I've ever done or said in my entire life, but I'm sure when I came and talked to you about trying to be less online, you know, in 2021, what I said was like, it had always been self-evident to me that to maintain any sort of workable relationship with the internet personally or professionally or intellectually or whatever,

it had to be clear that physical life was more important, that what happens civically in physical rooms is more important than whatever gets translated into the discourse or whatever, all these things. Like, actually what is in front of me physically, my community, blah, blah, blah, more real to me than anything that's happening online. And this year, that sense scrambled. It was like the internet had actually damaged

my perception of what was real. And that had always been so physically instinctive to me. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, author and New Yorker staff writer, Gia Tolentino. Gia was our very first offline guest, Max. That's so fun. All the way back in October of 2021.

Great guest to launch with. Everybody loves Gia. Everyone loves Gia. It's still one of my favorite conversations. I've been looking for an excuse to have her back on. And then the other day, Emily said, have you read Gia Tolentino's latest New Yorker piece? Because it's you, basically.

And then I saw the piece is called, My Brain Finally Broke. And I thought, yes, that does sound like me. It does sound like me. I relate to that headline. Oh, big time. So, I asked you to come back on the show. We talked all about this feeling that the world on our screens now often feels more

real and relevant than the offline world. Totally. And how reality itself is becoming harder to ascertain, especially with AI taking over our feeds now. The lines are blurring in a very scary way. Very much so. And the Trump administration second term is involved too. And we talk about it all.

We also talk about how we're both parenting in this moment of endless horrors. Our kids are the same age, so we are wrestling with similar issues there. All in all, it was a great conversation that you will hear in a bit. But first, they finally hit me where it really hurts, Max. They got you.

My Twitter account was hacked. Your greatest vulnerability. It's like, take anything from me. Don't take my Twitter account. I told you not to set one, two, three, four, five as your password. How many times did I tell you? That's my challenge.

So last week on Friday, Yeah, walk us through it. I received an email from what looks like it was, appeared to be an email from X. Sure. I've ever seen many of these phishing attempts in the past. I did not just fall off the turnip truck yesterday. Usually you see them and they look similar and then you look at the address where they're from

and it's all very, like you get it. This one, the address was x.com, though there was a, I should have seen there was like a dash before the X. So I should have seen that. And then also it had a picture of one of my tweets. And it was a screenshot of an NBC news story, which I then linked to in another tweet,

because of course, you know, links don't travel far. And it said there's a copyright infringement issue with you posting this. So it was very specific. Right. And I was like, that's weird. But first I was like, what are they talking about though? Like everyone screenshots that, you know?

And they're like, just, so they're like, click here. So I clicked. And then it went to a page that it looked, and I was like, it looks like the x.com page. Because I was, the clicking is one thing, but I was like, I'm not going to enter anything until I. Then I pulled up the X.com homepage, like in another separate browser.

And it was exactly the same. Wow. Exactly the same. And then it was like, so your, your account will be shut down or suspended in 24 hours. Unless you appeal. So then I, then I'm, then I clicked. And then I put in my password and, have Two Factor on and they sent a code to my phone and then I put the code in to sign up because I'm like, oh, well, this is

it's triggering my Two Factor and I'm getting a text from X. Oh, so you entered the Two Factor code in the fake website and somewhere in the other side of it, there's someone entering that into the real website. Okay So very very sophisticated Yeah Yeah And and that's when everything froze and then suddenly I was locked out of all my accounts and then I get an email from X saying the email associated with your Twitter account has changed to an email that I couldn't but good news you got your account back and

Then found out about a great crypto product that you wanted to share with your followers to let us all know about. Yes, there was some crypto tweets. There were a few Michael Jordan takes, which I'm famous for. Just retweeting Michael Jordan. I know, it's very weird. Very weird. I wonder if that's part of this scam or if this Serbian hacker just loves Michael Jordan. I don't know what's going on.

Anyway, so this was Friday afternoon and I didn't get my account back until Monday afternoon. It was a long weekend, Max. So I wanna walk through what happened here because these scams are rampant. Now they're actually happening all the time. Let me list through some other people. I was shocked at how many people this has happened to. Wired reporter Joel Kalili, which that should make you feel a little bit better.

Like if anybody is gonna know how to avoid this, it's gonna be someone like that. 50 Cent, who got scammed as part of a scripto. These are all crypto schemes. A crypto scheme that allegedly made 300 million dollars. The official accounts for the NBA, NASCAR, and the New York Post. Even the Brainiacs, the New York Post. Metallica, Sydney Sweeney, and Hulk Hogan. Not Sydney Sweeney, Hulk Hogan. I know, not Sydney Sweeney.

Both Lara and Tiffany Trump. And my favorite, the official account for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates crypto. Now that is... Which is kind of funny. You've got to kind of appreciate that. One of the reasons they got me is because- This is literally my first question.

Cause I have gotten this email and it's very convincing. I almost clicked on it. In fact, I took a screenshot of it and sent it to somebody and said, can you believe they're going to lock my account over this thing that I posted? Well, and the reason that I thought that is because of the new leadership of X and how, what a shit show. If this had been pre Elon Twitter,

I would be like, they're not going to fucking suspend my account over a copyright issue. They could like tell me to take down the post or whatever else, you know, but like you have to file an appeal because they're going to shut your account down. It seems real. Like that's crazy. But in this company, I was like, Oh, I don't know. It is kind of a feature of the fact that we are all using this website and app that we all know just like doesn't work because Elon Musk fired 80% of the

staff, so we assume it's going to be a shit show. We assume it's going to look bad. And also it seems totally feasible that because they, he deleted or locked a ton of people's accounts over stuff like tweeting news links that he didn't like. Yep, that's right. So it's something that I wanted to ask you about is that I have seen some joking speculation that like, Elon was behind this.

Yeah, no. As like revenge for you being, right. And I think we agree that that's not the case. This was just a normal phishing scam, just crypto pumping them. My read is actually slightly different here. I think this was divine intervention. I think this was God descending from heaven to say,

John, maybe it's time to take a break from Twitter. But John, tell us what you did with this divinely granted screen time break though, because it wasn't spend more time with your family, right? It wasn't take up a writing project. I will just say that it's funny that you mentioned that because my closest friend from childhood and college roommate who now lives in LA, Josh, he texted me and his text said, I feel like the universe gave you a beautiful gift when your Twitter got hacked. You could have just walked away and sailed off into the sunset. Yes, Josh, he was right.

You're like Robert De Niro in Heat, you can't walk away. So here's what happened. So first I was a little nervous that the hack had gone, that it was going other places. Sure. I just wanted, I sent, so our Crooked HQ Slack channel, which is everyone at the company, I said, anyone have any good advice to do if your Twitter account has been hacked?

And, you know, a couple people saw it as a content opportunity. Our producer, Claire, said, will you please share about this on Terminally Online next week? Always be contenting. I love it. David Toledo, maybe this is a sign you need a break. That was what I'm like, is anyone going to help me? Hashtag offline challenge from Charlotte. John, we are trying to help you. Your fiance said, Elon's revenge, SMH.

So yeah, that's the sort of support I got here, Crooked. So was it your idea to do what you decided to do instead of taking a screen time break or was it somebody's pitch? No, so Kayla, who runs social media for us, she was like, you know, you could take over the crooked account. And she's like, maybe we should,

because if you can then publicly say that you can't get it back, and so that maybe you can like start a public beef. And I was like, I don't think that's, I don't think public pressure right now is the best way to go. This was Friday afternoon when I couldn't get it back. So I was worried that other things were hacked. So then did a whole, you know,

had people help me figure out that like everything else was safe, so that was good. And then I went home Friday night. Oh, and then I talked, and then Jordan Silver said that he had heard Joel Kim Booster on Les Culturistas say that this happened to him and he had to get his lawyer involved. And it took like weeks and I don't know if he ever got it.

I think he left Twitter. Some people have just not gotten there. If they get locked out of their account, they just can't get back. So then I was really, so I talked to our companies, to Crooked's lawyers and they helpfully reached out to X because I had like reached out to them, but you get all these automated responses.

You can't get a real person There's nobody there and even with the lawyers on it and they and then X reached out and asked for a picture of my License so they could verify it was me and then they asked for an email another email wasn't another scam Social well that I had the lawyers being like, okay, they're gonna ask for your license. I knew that yeah Anyway, so the the process was crazy. But anyway, I go home Friday night and I have no Twitter. Right, so now what? This is not like offline challenge,

where it's not on the phone, but you can jump on the laptop. There's no Twitter. And I'm like, that's a good thing. I know, I was shaking. I was shaking. Friday night was rough, Saturday morning was rough. And by Saturday afternoon, I was shaking. I was shaking. Friday night was rough. Saturday morning was rough. And by Saturday afternoon, I was like, I think I'm going to go back to Kayla's idea.

And I like sheepishly text Kayla and I was like, okay, can I get the password for the company's account because I think I want to do this. So you realized that you had a crippling heroin addiction and your response to that was maybe I'll try cocaine. I can't get any heroin this weekend. Can I read what you had a crippling heroin addiction and your response to that was, maybe I'll try cocaine. I can't get any heroin this weekend. Can I read what you tweeted out? And you know what, the cocaine was not as good. It never is, man, it never is.

You tweeted out, on the official Crooked account, in the meantime, I'm taking over the Crooked account to follow the news and feed my debilitating addiction. Look, I appreciate the honesty, I do. And Tommy responded later, this is dark. I saw that. We're all worried about you. Was there no part of you that was like,

maybe this is an opportunity to follow Joel Kim Booster and to say, maybe I don't need to? No, not at all. You're shaking your head for people listening. Not at all. You look on your face, you're like, why would I think that? Let me tell you what was getting me.

What was getting me is not being, not figuring out how to follow developments in the news. Sure. And, uh, cause I was like going on the New York Times. I'm like, this is so slow. It is. They're not updating anything. It's true. And then I look, then I went on Blue Sky.

Okay. Which... Did we ski? I did not ski. Okay. But I was following the news and it's just, it is not a, I'm not going to do my typical blue sky complaining, but it is not a big enough platform yet with enough users that it is updating on a regular, like it's not

fast enough. Does now does the news really need to update that fast? Probably not. Right. That is part of the addiction. Right. Um, I will say that the, being on the Crooked account, we don't follow as many people from the company

as the Crooked account. You follow me, what more do you need? We don't follow like constant news people, which maybe it's a media company, but we follow our hosts and we follow some other people, but like not a lot of, so I'm scrolling on the company's feed, but I'm like, this is not that great. You're not getting the good stuff.

I'm not getting the good stuff. It does take a lot of time. So I kind of stopped and by Sunday, Sunday was Mother's Day and we let Emily. Great time for doom scrolling. Great, well, we let Emily like sleep till much later and so I had the kids all morning and then we did a whole family thing in the afternoon.

So it was just a big family day, and I did not scroll, because I didn't think the cricket feed was all that great. And you know what? I was pretty happy by Sunday night. Really? Wow, it's crazy how we keep trying these experiments where you take a break from Twitter,

you're happier, feel better about the world. I did have a little anxiety as I was trying to figure out what to cover on Pod Save America Monday morning. I mean, the jet happened, right? So that was easy enough. But as I was like, you know, our producer Saul sends a note at night and that's helpful with what the news is.

But it's like, again, I wake up Monday morning and usually I am like mainlining the news for the pod. And I woke up and it was just like, I felt a little bit drift. I do think to be like slightly sympathetic, there is something to the fact that so many of our media institutions have just adjusted to an ecosystem where the news addicts like you and me

who really wanna be up on everything also have Twitter. So they are not trying to play the same role as Twitter. So like the New York Times homepage is kind of designed for someone who also has Twitter up on the next screen. And that's like not their fault, but it does make it hard to get your news in an ecosystem that has kind of evolved to have this big hole in the middle of it that is filled currently by Twitter.

I definitely learned that during the tariffs and like economic collapse is like, you do kind of rely on it for better or for worse. I know. And I do think if someone was like, okay, you can't post all weekend and all you can do is just here's a feed of news of all the reporters and the, you know, the biggest outlets and all you can do is like, I would be okay with that. Right.

You kind of didn't have that. Now, again, I don't need to be that addicted to the news, but- That is also the thing we learned about. My New Year's resolution was to post a lot. Right. So I am almost afraid to ask this since I think I already know the answer, but has this experience at all changed your relationship

to Twitter or your phone? No, no. I didn't, yeah. I, you know, I had been. The New Year's resolution is holding strong. It's just. Which your mind people was to post more. Right. I had been, before this happened,

like really, and I'm doing this for like two weeks now, after the kids are in bed, Emily and I watch TV, I just put the phone somewhere else. Great, that's great, that's huge. Because if the phone is not around me, fine. You feel better, yeah. If the phone is around me, I will go to Twitter. What are you guys watching?

We watched Four Seasons. I don't know it. It's on Netflix. It was like an Alan Alda movie that they've now, at Tina Fey, redid as a series. So that was fun. That sounds great. It sounds lovely. And I'm watching the studio.

Love the studio. So good. It's so good. Hacks is amazing. Hacks is one of the best seasons. You're not watching Andor, are you? No, I didn't get into other Jon Favre's work. I don't think he's attached to this.

Is he not? I will say it is a very, it is a show with a lot to say politically. I won't give you the full, I could do two hours on it right now. I'm going to spare you, but it's excellent. And I think you don't need to be like into Star Wars. I know it sounds cringe to advocate Star Wars IP, but like you don't need to be into it to appreciate the show. This show is sponsored by Better Health.

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

We're therapy boys. We are. We're therapy boys. You are, we're therapy boys. You know, you've heard us say it before, it's great. You know, we're now trying to make sure there's a stigma on people who don't seek therapy. Yeah, that's right. We're trying to reverse the stigma,

not just get rid of it. You're not in therapy. Stigma. Stigma. BetterHelp has over 10 years of experience matching people with the right therapist from their diverse network of more than 30,000 licensed therapists with a wide range of specialties. BetterHelp is fully online, making therapy affordable and convenient, serving over 5 million people worldwide.

Easily switch therapists anytime at no extra cost. Go to therapy, try it out. Everyone needs it. Everyone could use it. Everyone feels better afterwards. We're all better with help. Visit betterhelp.com slash offline and get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash offline. Well, speaking of IP. Okay. How about that? Love, beautiful transition.

Let's talk about some actual news. On Saturday, roughly 24 hours after the U.S. Copyright Office released a detailed report raising concerns about tech companies using copyrighted materials to train AI models. President Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the agency's director. The report concluded that, quote, making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.

So basically using copyrighted material in AI systems is not legal, especially without compensating the people who created that material. Yep. What do you make of all this? So I think there are two ways that this is actually like kind of a really big deal. One is what it says about what's happening with big tech AI

where that's going, the other which we'll get into is that there was kind of a civil big deal. One is what it says about what's happening with big tech, AI, where that's going. The other, which we'll get into, is that there was kind of a civil war within Trump world over the weekend about this that is very revealing. But unlike... I couldn't follow it, by the way. So I don't really know. And don't worry about that. Over the weekend. significance of it for tech. Like we've had hints since the beginning of the big AI arms race rush that these companies are all stealing intellectual property. They're stealing books, they're stealing newspaper articles to illegally train their models on. And partly that is out of greed of not wanting to pay people for the rights for it.

But I think mostly it's out of competition with one another, where each company wants to be the first to develop a dominant AI model the way that Google did with search. And it takes a long time to strike AI deals with like every book publisher, every AI company. It's a lot faster to just steal it and just steal the material. So the AI companies faced a bunch of lawsuits over this from like publishers. And it has been gradually coming out in dribs and drabs through these tiles that like, yep, they did exactly what everybody thought. They were just like bit torrenting giant files of pirated books

to illegally train their models on. I think with the hope that they could just like get away with it, pay some trap or pay some like speeding fines basically, but then have an AI that would make them a bazillion dollars. But in the middle of all this, just a few days ago, out comes this bombshell copyright office report arguing that, stealing aside, the entire practice of training AI models on publicly available data is a violation of copyright law. So, like, the entire basis of these models is a copyright violation, which means that not only to keep the models going do they have to cut IP deals with every single publisher they've stolen data from, do they have to cut IP deals with every single publisher

they've stolen data from, but they have to do it retroactively, which is just like, you know, completely pulls the foundation out from under this entire business model because they've already done all this copyright violation. It means the publishers have all the leverage. Well, we should say that the report does not have the force of law behind it. No, it doesn't. It's just recommendations. And it doesn't say, even the report, and this is important because of what happens to the

person gets fired, the person gets fired. The report itself said, you know, it still might be too early for government intervention because there are licensing deals being worked out, but this is what we think. It does, as this is being fought out in the courts right now, there are many different cases about copyright and AI. And what the courts would do is they think about this and think about ruling on this as they would look to the government to see what the US Copyright Office says about this. So in that way, it's a big deal. Yeah, it wasn't like a silver bullet in and of itself, but it was another big step towards

undercutting these business models. Yeah, so they put out the report, they fire Pearlmutter. And her boss. And her boss. Which was at the Library of Congress for some reason. I don't really know. And they put into,

so they put in the Doge people? So this is the drama, is what happens after they are fired. Because we know now from reporting by Tina Nguyen at the verge that it was probably Elon Musk and David Sacks behind the firing. But then the big fight is over who is gonna replace them because there's immediately this huge internal backlash

from Mike Davis, who is this like kind of crazy MAGA lawyer who's very anti-tech and a bunch of the anti-tech MAGA people and like MAGA content creators, including Laura Loomer, who immediately got very upset about this, as this is far right job, Laura Loomer. Mike Davis gave a quote to The Verge. He said, quote, you can say, well, we have to compete with China. No, we don't have to steal content to compete with China.

We don't have slave labor to compete with China. It's a bullshit argument. And then this like MAGA wing got Trump to send three replacements in who were extremely anti-tech, like even more anti-tech than the people they were replacing, including a guy, Todd Blanche, who was Trump's personal attorney in the Stormy Daniels hush money trial. Oh, yeah. You don't remember Todd Blanch? I was not up on the Todd Blanch lore, but I am now.

A lawyer who worked with Republican Representative Jim Jordan in the House Judiciary Tech investigation. So this is like really, really anti-tech, like from term one people. It's a big L for the Elon Musk wing who thought they were doing this coup. And then Trump re-truthed Mike Davis's complaint about the whole thing.

Yes. Which is like, before everyone knew that they had replaced the Perlmutter with the anti-tech Trump people. And so I was like, does he know what he's doing here? But clearly he was like, no, no, everything's good now. Yes, it was very funny to see him re-truth someone's criticism of something he had done the day before. But it looks like what happened was there was this big fight

between the Doge Elon Musk, like crypto people and the old like mega culture war people and the mega culture war people won. And I am with the mega culture war people on this one. I know, I was going to say, it's a real sign of the times when you're fucking rooting for the Laurel Loomer wing of the party. I am so hard on this one. And here's why, the copyright issue is bad enough,

but, and this is connected to it, AI, as it continues on and gets faster and bigger and smarter and all the rest, it's going to replace a whole bunch of jobs, a whole bunch of industries, professions. And the idea that it is replacing these based on value that other people created, that it stole so that the tech companies can make a ton of money. And the tech companies refuse to pay for it, pay what they should have paid for it, because that doesn't help their business model,

because they still don't even know how to make this profitable for themselves. And so it's like all these people that has created all this value and all this content and entertainment and knowledge and everything else, we're just gonna steal it all and then you're all gonna be out of a job. Right, and they're gonna produce a cheap shitty version

and pay you nothing. Yeah, and you can just consume. You can just use ChatGPT. Say you're a cocoon. Get yourself a bot friend, chat bot friend. And Sam Altman's like, and universal basic income. Yeah, I'm sure that'll work too, right? We'll just cut you a check every month and you just sit around glued to your computer while we make all the money. And Sam Altman's like, and universal basic income. Yeah, I'm sure that'll work too.

We'll just cut you a check every month and you just sit around glued to your computer while we make all the money. Your Doge dividend of three cents based on your- Oh, fucking real. This is Elon, this is- We talked about this with Zuckerberg and the 15 friends. It's like, this is an anti-human ideology that they have.

It really is, yes. And seeing how much they want to train these chat bots to like replace people. And I keep thinking about that Apple ad that came out last year. Remember where it was training? It was an Apple ad for their AI services. Or maybe it was Google actually.

I hope I didn't just slander, slandered one of them. So we'll just say it comes out evenly. The ad was, oh, it's Christmas or it's like your anniversary, Father's Day or something, and you forgot to get something for your partner, so just have the AI bot create something for them, create like a card for them based on like training data. And it's like, oh, you just wanna remove

all of our most human obligations to each other and our relationships and replace it with like a little chat bot widget. Well, guess who doesn't like that? The Vatican. Laura Lumer. The Vatican. Okay, here we go. Rare offline Vatican Laura Lumer agreement on something.

Last week, Robert Prevost, who hails from the south side of Chicago, became the first American Pope. He decided to take the name Pope Leo XIV. And then he explained to his fellow cardinals that he chose the name in honor of Pope Leo XIII, who served as head of the Catholic Church during the Industrial Revolution. Leo XIV told the crowd, quote, in our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor. Wow. Turns out that the woke Marxist pope is actually the woke offline pope. You can still sing that to the tune of Pink Pony Club,

fortunately. Should we invite our offline Pontiff onto the pod? Oh my God, I feel like Vivek Murthy and Lena Kahn are now facing some real competition for third chair of the show. We're gonna get, he's not gonna be busy, right? We can get Leo on here. I think we can get one of his brothers. They're all over TV all the time.

That's true. Although I think they're a little more maga. What did you make of this? I thought, I think it's really interesting as kind of a data point about like where we are culturally. Like it made me immediately think back to the story I told on here a couple of weeks ago about an Easter sermon that Julia went to

where the pastor kept being like, kept talking about protecting kids from the internet. Like I think we're at a point where concern about AI and technology is bubbling up to a kind of cultural consensus. And I think you see that reflected in what he said. And he's especially like, he's a relatively young guy. I mean, he's in his sixties, but he's not that far removed from working with regular

people with parishioners. So it makes me think that this is like, reflects the kind of concerns that he is listening to. But I'm curious what you think. Like, do you think this is gonna, does it matter that he is like? Yes, I think it matters. I mean, will it be effective? I have no idea.

Yeah. I think it matters. I also think it's not surprising. So Pope Francis also had these same views. About AI. Yeah. I didn't know that. And there was an encyclical that the Vatican released at the beginning of January or the end of January this year.

And just going to read some of it. Since AI cannot offer this fullness of understanding, approaches that rely solely on this technology or treat it as the primary means of interpreting the world can lead to a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things and for the broader horizon. Human intelligence is not primarily about completing functional tasks, but about understanding and actively engaging with reality and it's all its dimensions. And then it says a person's worth and then it talks about he's very and Leo, this Pope is very worried specifically about replacing labor and and people's jobs, stuff like that.

And it says, drawing an overly close equivalence between human intelligence and AI risks succumbing to a functionalist perspective where people are valued based on the work they can perform. However, a person's worth does not depend on possessing specific skills, cognitive and technological achievements or individual success,

but on the person's inherent dignity, grounded in being created in the image of God." And I do think that, and when you read the encyclical, it is as much of a response to the techno-futurist, sort of trans-human view of the world that Elon represents. And that I do think some of the MAGA people who are maybe in more of a religious tradition oppose than anything else.

It is so interesting to hear them couch it in protecting the idea of there being something sacrosanct about being human, and about that being under threat by technology that obviously resonates with me even though there is something a little bit cyber-punky about it. I'm kind of surprised to find myself reading more religious voices these days. Me too.

I'm not like a religious person at all. I'm not spiritual. I don't like the organizer, like always been like, you know, kind of apart from it. But I do think that it does make a lot of sense that that would be where a lot of the reaction to these trends from big tech and social isolation would come from because, you know, what is a big religious organization

if not a community, place to come together, a set of shared values that would link people. I mean, it's a lot of what we talk about here about Robert Putnam, bowling alone, the loss of third spaces. That's a role that religion has played in human civilization for thousands of years. Yeah, and Pope Leo talks a lot about

Catholic social teaching, and that was a big deal for the last Leo as well. Catholic social teaching is in some, it's like the right things of it is commie at this point, communist. Yeah, right. And you know, I mean, the idea that we have obligations to learn about it.

I went to a Jesuit college, so it was very like social justice was at the core of that. And so everyone's always like, oh, we'll poke, but really Francis and now Leo, I think their beliefs are grounded more in the Catholic social teaching that you're right, like people are not. I mean, he says later,

the logical consequence of the technocratic paradigm is a world of humanity enslaved to efficiency where ultimately the cost of humanity must be cut. I mean, it sounds like a pretty lefty. It does, yeah. But that's the Pope. I mean, I think that there, I was thinking a lot about the last Pope's first few years

and the emphasis that he put on the global migration crisis specifically, which is obviously a thing for him like throughout his 10 years. Is that the word for when you're a Pope? Yeah. Tenure? We'll say tenure. Yeah.

Rain? Not rain. It's not rain. Your term. You know, his first trip was to the island of Lampedusa, which is an Italian island, the Mediterranean, where a lot of refugees would be there for a stop and they would get like maybe led into the EU, maybe horribly mistreated there.

And obviously he did not like single-handedly solve the global refugee crisis, nor did he solve the far right backlash to immigration. But I do think if you look at, especially the politics within Europe, him just being a voice and a prominent figure to say, we all know what's right here and we all know what's wrong here and we have to make space for that and keep that in mind.

I think that you probably don't get things like Germany letting in a million refugees in 2015 without that. So I don't know what the specific line is. Like I don't know that Congress is going to pass like better AI regulations because of Pope Leo, but it's also not out of the realm of possibility. And I do think there is something to having such a visible cultural figure who, whether you are Catholic or not, kind of like everybody agrees is a moral authority and a moral voice in the world.

Someone needs to offer a moral or ethical compass around AI that is not immediately seen as, oh, this is a politician. Compromised. Right. Exactly. What do we always talk about? We talk about the importance of institutions. That's right.

This is one of the last trusted institutions globally. Yeah. And they've had a rough go at it too. I know. I wouldn't have expected that that would be the outcome, but I think a lot of that is Francis's stewardship. Yeah, that's right. All right.

In a minute, we're going to jump into my interview with Gia Tolentino. Before we do, some quick housekeeping. Amanda Lippmann, she has her new book out. It's called when we're in charge of the next generation's guide to leadership. It's out now It's it's the latest from cricket media reads Amanda has started run for something which helps young people run for office for local office and in this book Amanda shares what it looks Like when a new generation steps into power not not just in politics, but business, activism, and everyday life. We really want to help Amanda get onto the New York Times bestseller list, so get your copy of When We're In Charge at crooket.com slash books

now or wherever you get books. Up next, a conversation with Gia Tolentino. Offline is brought to you by Fatty15. Have you heard about C15? It's an essential fatty acid that's naturally found in whole fat dairy products, but over time our intake of these foods has decreased. Combined with the natural decline of C15 as we age, many of us aren't getting enough of this important nutrient.

Introducing Fatty15's C15 supplement, a simple way to replenish your body with this essential fatty acid. Co-founder, Dr. Stephanie Venn Watson discovered the benefits of C-15 while working with the U.S. Navy. Backed by science and supported by over 100 studies, C-15 helps support cell function and resiliency and can be a valuable part of your long-term health strategy.

Fatty 15 is vegan, 100% pure and free from flavors, fillers, allergens, or preservatives. Best of all, Fatty 15 is vegan, 100% pure, and free from flavors, fillers, allergens, or preservatives. Best of all, Fatty15 comes in a gorgeous reusable glass bamboo jar and refills are shipped right to your door. So do yourself a favor, replenish your C15, restore your health, and let yourselves do the heavy lifting with Fatty15. Fatty15 is on a mission to optimize your C15 levels to help you live healthier, longer. You can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15.com slash offline and use code offline at checkout.

Gia Tolentino, welcome back to the show. Hello, how are you doing? Good. You were the very first guest on this podcast. I remember that. October of 2021. It was three and a half years ago. Really? I know.

Well, like, does that feel like just yesterday? Does it feel like a decade ago? I don't know. Time's lost all meaning. I can't tell. Yeah, I was gonna guess 2023. So, yeah, wow. Good to see you again. Good to see you again.

Good to see you too. I've been meaning to have you back on the show, and then I read your latest essay in the New Yorker, My Brain Finally Broke, which I think... Good headline, right? ...perfectly captures, at least for me, what it feels to live in this moment. For people who haven't read it,

when and why did your brain finally break? I mean, it's such a good question. You know, I really couldn't answer that for you. I was asking, I live with the writer Max Reed and we were like in this little mini commune situation. And I feel like one day we were just sitting around on a Sunday and I was like, Max, does your brain feel bad right now?

And he was like, what do you even mean, Gia? Like, are you asking since what, 2016, 2020, the pandemic, the birth of my first child? Like, what are we talking about? Like, the second Trump presidency? Like, what, what, there are so many landmarks at which one could say, you know, but I think I was feeling kind of extraordinarily foggy. Basically once Trump got into office, and for the second time, and started blitzing through the sort of breakneck, sort of executive orders and like all this Project 2025

just rolling out like a cartoon tongue on like Looney Tunes. I felt like we were all having, many of us were having a strange response to this because outrage felt almost outdated. I had personally lost all sense of civic reality or what one could even do about atrocities that the government is facilitating or permitting since Gaza. And I think what made me decide to write it was the feeling that, you know, when I looked at my phone, I felt like I used to have a handle on how the internet was distorting things

or what kind of distortions it was presenting. But I started to just look and just, the instinctive searching for, okay, that's real, that's fake, that's fake. It started to not work anymore. The calculus was wrong. I didn't trust Google. I didn't trust the websites that I would look at when Google would send me to something. I'd be looking at something and I would think, wait, a machine wrote this. I started to feel that reflexive fact-checking impulse slackened in a really scary way.

And there was this whole category of sort of AI generated things that even asking the question, is this real or is this fake no longer pertained in the same way? And it was that in particular, that sense that like the traditional thing I would do when I would look at something and be like, is this real and what does this mean? Both halves of that question, there was not a clear cognitive path to investigate that question.

Does that make sense at all? Well, here's why it makes sense to me, because I have been, since Trump took office again, you know, there are a lot of explanations of why this time feels different, and people will say, everyone is exhausted, people are afraid, people feel like the resistance didn't work the first time, right? And so there's all these sort of political explanations.

And I feel like we've been missing what has changed about the internet and our phones and our screens. And I think you capture that well, because you were saying that the idea that Trump is harnessing the acceleration of the internet to do so much damage so quickly, it's become like cliche to talk about

Steve Bannon's flood the zone strategy, but it does feel like so much of what Trump is doing is connected to both the speed of the internet these days and like the blurred line between online and offline. And I just don't know that if any account of this era is complete without that part of what's going on. Right. I think, you know, I think the internet has profoundly damaged all of our senses of the real. And I think the thing that got to me this year was that for a really long time it hadn't damaged mine.

I'm sure that when I came on, not that I remember any single thing that I've ever done or said in my entire life, but I'm sure when I came and talked to you about trying to be less online, you know, in 2021, what I said was like, it had always been self-evident to me that to maintain any sort of workable relationship with the internet personally or professionally or intellectually or whatever, it had to be clear that physical life was more important, that like what happens civically in physical rooms is more important than whatever gets translated into the discourse. Or, you know, whatever, all these things that like actually what is in front of me physically, my community, blah, blah, blah, more real to me than anything that's happening online.

And this year, that sense scrambled. It was like the Internet had actually damaged my perception of what was real. And that had always been so physically instinctive to me, that this is the world. This is the physical thing that is important. But this year, it was like the strange things that were happening on the internet started to feel, and everything was laced through with the surreality of the internet.

And it started to feel more accurately descriptive of political and civic and social reality than what was going on physically. And that really scared me. And I think that there, I think what I was trying to get at with this piece is I think there is a internet-based, there's a phone-based permission structure to detach from reality entirely.

I think that we have all felt that moment to moment. I think that those of us for whom it is our job to try to, I think that's what also scared me. It was like, technically it's kind of part of my job to try to resist insanity or whatever. And even though this is both kind of my job and also something that I kind of inherently invested in, I was like, I'm kind of losing my ability to do this.

There was this whole category of thing that I would look at and I was like, what is this? And it was any number of things, right? It was the fact that so many fake images of kids in Gaza have gone viral alongside a bunch of other AI slop. And whether something is real or whether something is fake, there is just this like mushroom cloud of stuff generated every millisecond that is there to cloud whether it is real or fake for anyone else or something like that. And I think, yeah, you like look at enough Tmoo ads or whatever, and you're just like, you know, like, and you log on to x.com and every single paid advertisement is someone that's in the middle of a psychotic break.

And every reply is someone who's also in the middle of a psychotic break. And that's literally what the platform was prioritizing. And you're just like, wow, the world's kind of incomprehensible. And you detach for whatever, five seconds, 30 seconds, five minutes, the rest of that day, that week, you have a weird week, or it can go on for longer. And I think that's the thing that started to, you know, I was like, this is happening to me, surely this is happening to a lot of people.

And the fact that I, you know, I think we've all dealt since 2016 or really since, I don't know, the Iraq war, whatever, with like this sense of, do we tap out for a second, do we tap back in? I think we learned from the 2016 era that the sort of dumbest and most performative kinds of like orange Tito hashtag resistance, whatever, it's not useful, but it kind of had felt like there was something in the air that like, maybe a lot, maybe people were detaching for longer and kind of in a more

existential way and that the, the nature of this detachment was itself corrosive. It wasn't a break. It wasn't a regrouping. It was kind of like the satellite was moving away from the mothership and maybe never to return. I feel like there was more, it felt like there was more connection. Like we were like part of a community,

not necessarily people we knew, but like everyone was sort of trying to figure out how to move forward and beat Trump and maybe this is a one-time thing and we're gonna do marches and we're gonna do this and all that, and now it feels a lot more decentralized, lonelier, more individual, because you have this need to sort of detach.

But I've been sort of obsessed with like one of the most salient dividing lines now politically, especially in the last election, is people who didn't pay attention or don't pay attention to the news very closely, like voted for Trump by a healthy margin. People who get most of their news from social media voted for Trump by a smaller margin.

And then people who paid close attention to the news, whether it's television, digital sites, wherever, voted for Kamala. And so then you have this big swath of the American public who is not consuming political news on any kind of regular basis. And then all of these horrors start in January of 2025, new horrors from Donald Trump.

And I found myself, you know, I follow this every day. This is my part, this is my job. And I'm just like, this is so awful. How are people not freaking out about this? And I do think that part of the answer is they, they're not paying attention. And the reason they're not paying attention is because it's, you don't know what paying

attention actually will do. Like how will it help the situation? How do we have agency in this kind of world anymore, right? The internet sort of like levels everything so that there is a horror that you see one second and the next second, it's AI slop and the next second it's something funny and then we just forget about it. Yeah. I think that even people who do pay attention to the news, there's a question of what does this attention mean now? I think one of the things that I was trying to,

that was also getting at me at a really deep level, was that I felt that we had lost, we have, I certainly have lost the language or the register. I'm sure you felt this with which to kind of tonally describe what this is, you know? The fact that it just didn't make sense. One wants, one has an old fashioned desire to say, that's illegal, you know?

Or like, that's fascism, or, you know, that's horrifically unjust, but it's illegal, you know, or like that's fascism or, you know, that's horrifically unjust, but it's like, that doesn't matter anymore. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't matter anymore because of the mechanisms of the internet and the way that, like, what even constitutes an outrage, I think has just been wildly scrambled by the nature of the internet in the last eight years. It's like there's no, it's spooky the way that kind of, there's no language for what the outrage should be almost. What stage we're at in it.

There's also like a daily and now hourly amnesia that it causes. It's like every hour is memento. I mean, I think about this in the context of, just to give an example, the Kilmire Obrego Garcia case. And so they ship this guy to a prison in El Salvador, and people aren't really paying attention. And then a bunch of people start yelling about it.

I was starting yelling about it. You do your videos, do your podcast, everyone else is talking about it. And suddenly now people are worked up a little bit. And now the courts are ruling in the right way. And then of course the Trump administration's like, no, we don't care. And then there's like tens of others like him.

And now there's like 20s of others. And then they're like tens of others like him. And now there's like 20s of other, and then they're like kidnapping college students. And now they're maybe sending people to Libya. And it's just like, it starts proliferating. And you can already feel the attention on that story, or at least on that policy slipping away. Because it's like, we had that moment, everyone, we got everyone's attention attention people freaked out a little bit

But no one can sustain keeping the attention on it, and I think the Trump administration knows that And whether it's intentional or not that's what it's helping them certainly I thought about this I remember even when the war in Ukraine started and Gaza right which is I'm like Putin knows this BB knows this and now Trump knows this which is now Trump knows this, which is like, if we just hang on and keep doing what we're doing, they're all going to get tired out. And if they're not tired, they're just going to stop paying attention. And they're just going to be distracted. And then they're going to move on with their lives

because we can just wait them out. There's also something to to what you were saying that applies to all these cases where it's like, it's not just they're going to keep going. It's they're going to repudiate the very idea of outrage by being like, sorry, we're going to do it to 20 more, 20X, we're going to 20X it tomorrow. And then we're going to 100X it the day after that. And it's like, the thing you thought was so awful, that don't worry, that has been seamlessly and irreversibly stamped onto the past. It happened and it's going to, you know what I mean? Like, how could it not be conscious? I mean, like Trump is and Musk and all these,

they are creatures of the internet. Like they are where they are because the most sort of psychopathic aspects of their temperamental preset map perfectly onto the worst incentives of sort of information distribution on the internet. And so they like, they know that actually because of the internet, there is, right,

this like new sort of civic permission structure to do anything you want because the piano is dropping on all of our heads every 30 seconds, you know? Like migrants like Guantanamo, and then it's like, what, 500 million condoms and gossips? Like it's just, you know, you can't, and actually the Kilmar-Reya-Garcia thing, I've been kind of privately flagging

these moments of like, these would be part of my sort of historical record timeline of like when it all really dissolved. And when Trump on Truth Social like tweeted or whatever that that picture with the fake when he posted. Yeah, and it was like that was really emblematic of what was troubling about the like, you can't ask if this is real or if it's fake because that's not even a sufficient question to describe the way people are working anymore. Like he tweeted a picture of I think real tattoos but then like it was like MS Paint, like MS13, like it was so clearly photoshopped, they were not real real. They were not Photoshopped in a way to be convincing. And it didn't matter, you know? And it's like, you're saying-

And then the discussion became, it's what it does to the debate too, because there's so many levels. And at the fundamental level of the debate is like, you sent this guy to prison, and you admitted that it was the wrong thing to do. And the Supreme Court told you to bring him back and you're not doing. Like that is the fundamental story.

But then he tells Terry Moran, well, it says MS-13. He's like, no, no, that was Photoshopped. And then there's a debate about the Photoshop where there's some people where Donald Trump, you know, believes or doesn't believe or at least is telling us that he thinks it's real. And then you've got a lot of his supporters on TV, on Fox and elsewhere, and they're like,

well, obviously the MS-13 wasn't real, but those tattoos do mean MS-13. It was like, well, that's not true either. Right. You know, but all of this is beside the point, right? It doesn't matter if it wasn't real. It doesn't matter if the tattoos, like you sent them there for the wrong reasons

and you gotta bring them back. That's the debate, but we don't even get there anymore. That's like lost in the dust. Right, the question, like the very project of ascertaining reality is itself being used as a force field for, you know, for the rest. And like that, I mean, that sort of like physics of this is, existentially is, yeah, I mean, anyway, my brain broke. And I was like, well, my brain broke. And I was like, I can't write anything because my brain's broken.

And then that lasted for like four months and I was like, well, maybe I could write about my brain being broken. I'm glad that you did. Offline is brought to you by Wild Alaskan Company. Wild Alaskan Company is the best way to get wild caught perfectly portioned nutrient dense seafood delivered directly to your door. You haven't tasted fish this good.

I love it. Tell us about it. Let me tell you something, all right. I had salmon, all right. I made a miso ginger salmon from the salmon from Wild Alaskan Company. Excellent. I made a halibut dish based on New York Times recipe.

I think it's called aqua panna, panna. I don't know, but it was great. And it's very, look, you get this big box, comes in the mail, you put it in your freezer, and then you're like, you know what? Tomorrow, let's have fish. Take those, take and put them in the fridge. Next day, you're having fish. Boom, fish. And so I took out the halibut, put it in the fridge. Then you know what? Tomorrow, let's have fish. Take those, take them, put them in the fridge. Next day, you're having fish.

Boom. Fish. And so I took out the halibut, put it in the fridge. Then you know what I did at work in between our various meetings? I looked up halibut recipes. Next thing you know, I'm making halibut. Wow. Yeah. I really like it.

I really like it. The only thing stopping me from making it again is I feel like fish three nights in a row is too much. For me, for me. Yeah, but maybe not for you, dear listener. Why choose wild caught seafood? It's 100% wild caught, never farmed. This means there are no antibiotics, GMOs,

or additives, just clean, real fish that support healthy oceans and fishing communities. It's nutrient rich and full of flavor. Wild Alaskan fish is frozen off the boat to lock in taste, texture, and nutrients like omega-3s. I made a, I used basil to make a, I made a chiffonade. I don't even know what that is? It's just how you cut them based on,

it's just a fancy way of saying cut. Can you cut basil? Yeah, I think so, keep going. It's sustainably sourced, wild-cut from Alaska. Every order supports sustainable harvesting practices and your membership delivers flexible shipments, expert tips and truly feel good seafood. I made a chiffonade of basil.

A chiffonade of basil. Chiffonade of basil. It just looks like it's, it all doesn't matter. It's gonna go great with that halibut. See, it looks like that. You kinda make it kinda, make it nice. Look at that. French style. Best of all, you can try it risk-free with the Wild Alaskan Company's 100% money back guarantee.

If you're not completely satisfied with your first box, Wild Alaskan Company will give you a full refund. No questions asked, no risk. Huge fan. Just high quality seafood. Not all fish are the same. Get seafood you can trust. Go to wildalaskan.com slash offline for $35 off your first box of premium wild cod seafood.

That's wildalaskan.com slash offline for $35 off your first order. Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. You write and you just, you mentioned Gaza like you write that your your psychological reaction to Trump and your civic sense of what ought to be done under the thumb of this administration has been radically altered by the war in Gaza. Can you talk a little bit about why? Yeah, I think I mean, so like, that's like that's the sort of dark star example.

That's the shadow, the sort of sucking horrific void underneath all of this for me, right? Because it's like, you remember, you remember like four days after the bombing campaign started, you remember like the first, the Al-Shifa for the first time, you know, they were like, who bombed the hospital? And Israel was like, we would never bomb the

hospital, you know, and then the debate became like, did they actually bomb the hospital or not? And it's like, I mean, that the patterning of the last 18 months was like, every day you look at things that you're like, this is incomprehensible suffering that is being funded by billions and billions of dollars of our taxpayer money every year. And everyone in our government, at least for a while, was like wholeheartedly in support of it. And you're like how, like, you know, I think it broke something in a lot of people, right? Like it's, it, it was like you, the marches were every weekend multiple times a week self-immolation, you know, so many arrests, so many highway blockages, so many like continual protests outside every congressperson's house, office, you know, like I, innumerable letters

that I've written, innumerable marches that my children have been dragged to. And it was like, at some point it just became clear that it wasn't going to do anything. And everything was just going to keep happening. Everything that seemed inconceivably cruel and unjust, it would just keep happening. And there was really no one in power that had a real investment in stopping it. And if that has been true for this long, with this that is still happening, with the aid blockade now going on however many weeks or whatever, it's like, what are we going to do about Trump? And I think for a lot of people on the left, I think it was just like, it permanently damaged

my sense of our government's remaining capacity for moral action, you know, or to stop a train or to stop cruelty in its tracks. And it's bad because I don't know, I haven't, have I sent any letters about things in the last 90 days? Like about, I don't know that I have actually. Like I think I've signed some things, but you know, like I haven't, because it's like no one, I don't know, no one's doing, no one's doing anything. The Democrats aren't doing anything about anything.

I think you said in the piece that like, what's the use of screaming? We're gonna be stuck in the room with him for four years. There's a little feeling. Yeah. And I, you know, I think about that too, because I, you know, part of what we do here is to try to give people tools and information and ways to get involved. And we continue to do that.

At the same time, I'm like, well, it's four years of this. And even if we and we got to win the midterms, but I'm like, what does winning the midterms means? Well, it means I guess Democrats can stop a legislative agenda. Well, he's doing most of this without legislation. Democrats have subpoena power again. Well, are they gonna actually answer the subpoenas? Probably not.

So yes, we absolutely have to win the house back and we have to stop their legislative agenda. But like we're still stuck with him for four years and then what do we do at the end of four years you know and so the I think at one point you said something about like the future the future is inconceivable and like the past is the past is gone and so we're just like stuck in this present. Yeah. And it's like replenish it's like endlessly replenishing. Yeah and I think you know part of the thing with Gaza too, it was sort of like, do Democrats

care about the suffering and death of the marginalized? You know what I mean? Like do, like, of the profoundly, like, globally marginalized, like, do we care? Do we, despite the rhetoric, do the Democrats care? Like, I mean, no one wanted USAID to shut down on the left, I'm sure, but it instantly sort of refracted huge amounts of the American population and the global population as fundamentally disposable in the eyes of many, many, many, many people in power. You can't ignore the

fact that like, you know, an enormous amount of like, needless, innocent death and suffering took place with the US's full support every single day for, we're going to hit two years really, really soon. And Democrats didn't really do anything. And I found it really chilling and disappointing that I had such little reaction to the inaction of the Democratic party after Trump came back in office. I was, it scared me how much I was like, yeah, well, what else was I gonna expect from you motherfuckers?

And I was like, that's not, you know, I like, I don't, that's a really bad vibe for someone that really believes in like civic participation. Yeah. You know, it's. I mean, look, I've, I felt it too. And, and I have yelled about it. And then I've also been like, okay, well, what are they,

what are they going to do? What can we do? I mean, I think to the Gaza point too, like there has been horrific bloodshed, you know, genocides, murder for like most of human history, right? We've had these like horrible. I think that to go back to the internet for a second, I think one of the hopes of the internet age was it will be harder for that to happen because now we'll have to look at it every day and we'll all be witness to it. Now we're all witness to it and we have more information and more insight into actually

what's happening, but we don't necessarily have more agency because of the internet. I mean, we should, we still have agency, but it's everything happens so fast. And, you know, I think about this too. I think about the war in Ukraine, right? That happens like it just slaughter Putin is slaughtering people. There's like 20,000 children who have been kidnapped from Ukraine. There's just the images of people,

of kids from Gaza is like horrific. You brought up USAID. That was like the first thing I was so fucking incensed about in the Trump administration. And I haven't thought about it now for like a week until you just mentioned, or I guess Bill Gates said, Elon Musk is killing children. And it came up in the headlines again. I was like, Oh yeah, that's right. Yes. And I was just, there's this, there's this line from Alan deBatton where he writes in news, a user's guide. And I think I've

thought about it like throughout the Trump era and even before that. And he talks about how following the news can feel as though we are daily being invited to watch helplessly while a close friend drowns behind a plate glass window. Right. And that to me is so much of the experience of watching the news unfold, particularly in the Trump era, on our phones.

Yeah, and there's kind of all of the very, all the specifics of this aside, I do think there's an accumulative effect of not just, you know, basically ever since Zuckerberg said that thing about, you know, the squirrel dying in your front lawn and a person, you know, starving in Sudan or whatever he said. It's like there is a, there is kind of an accumulative effect on all of us that the permission structure to detach from reality, the foundation of it has been led as soon as we had access to sort of feed based information. We saw things that we had no hope of changing. You know, like when like basically since we started seeing like close-up cell phone footage of people in natural

disasters like across the world, all of that has I think slowly and now, you know, it's metastasized and it's like exponentially more dire for all of these reasons. But yeah, there is something inherently about like the sort of, well, my email, you know, like it's. Yeah. yeah. Like I saw this image, it's horrifying. Maybe I post about it. Maybe I talk to someone about it.

Maybe I write a letter. Maybe I go to a protest. It's like, and then what? And you know, I think to myself, okay, well, civil rights movement, the most successful nonviolent movement, certainly in the United States history, that took a decade, two decades, many decades. But there was something different in that,

I don't know, without the internet back then, like you knew that there was some progress or you felt like, okay, we're taking a step forward, this is good, or maybe you weren't seeing all the horrors every day. Like, there's just, I always wonder, like, how did they do it and keep up and not feel like this is pointless?

We have no agency, we keep getting beat down by these assholes, we're never gonna, you know, we're never gonna have the right to vote, we're never gonna have right to quality. And it just seems, it seems so much harder now. Well, if you think about like, I mean, what did a presidential debate look like in the 60s?

Like what were the blocks of times that, I don't know actually, but like what, it wouldn't be the 45 seconds that everyone's getting for speech and rebuttal now, you know? Like there was, that was the single sin and the single attempt at redemption and the single, I mean, obviously not single, there was a lot of other stuff, but you know what I mean?

That had the stage probably, that had, that was the singular thing and the backdrop of people's consciousness for years and years and years. It would not be possible for even something of that magnitude to hold attention for that long now, right? For people to- Yeah, I mean, I was thinking when John Lewis had his

skull bashed in on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, part of the strategy was we're going to be nonviolent and we know that there's going to be violence visited upon us and that should shape, hopefully would shape public opinion. When that happened, that led the nightly news on all three networks, which had a reach of tens of millions of people all watching the same thing. And so public opinion starts to change. There is no medium whereby a news event captures or is broadcast to the most of the country at the same time anymore.

I mean, people don't agree that Biden won in 2020, you know, like, like, and not just like people like plenty of people that are like elected. It's like there's, you know, like there's no, I mean, I have not in any way given up on like messaging and communication and policy and like the policy platforms that I believe in and like the way that that actually does communicate. You see the audiences at the corny, but you know, literally God bless them, the oligarchy tour,

like there are ways to cut through. There are ways to communicate the truth about reality. But I have not detached from reality. I wrote this piece in part because I was like, you can't. You can't actually do this. You don't want to do this. And the feeling that's kind of the fog that's growing between you and reality, you got to kind of bat through it. But I do think that traditional methods are not working. No. And well, one reason I think about it differently now, because there's part of me that I'm like, you know, is this good for my mental health?

Obviously, this is my job. But, you know, wouldn't it be easier to like detach from the news and to just go like live my life and stuff like that. But you know, we both have kids. And I think last time we spoke, I think your eldest daughter is like a couple weeks apart from Charlie, my eldest son.

And now you have a second and I think they were in the, you think you have a 2023 baby, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I do too. I have about 10 years from 2023. Good age gap, right? It's a great age gap.

It's a great age gap. It's a great age gap. We love it. But I feel like last time we spoke, we were trying to figure out like which parts of our lives were exhausted because of parenthood and which was the pandemic. And now we're all past that. But how has being a parent changed your relationship with the Internet screens and how you think about your kids' relationship to screens and the Internet? Unfortunately, like thinking about my kids growing up in this political system,

I'm sort of like, it's almost it's like turning me into a member of the Weather Underground a little bit. Like, I'm sort of like, it's almost, it's like turning me into a member of the weather underground a little bit. Like, I'm sort of like, like, I'm just gonna be real with you. Like, that's kind of where I'm at. Like, like, you know, like, when you when when the time comes to explain the, you know, the just profound immorality of our policy structures, and then they're like, what do we do about it? Like, I don't like, I'd be like, Well, you know, I write letters and I go to protests and I vote in all my local elections. It's like, they're going to be like, that's clearly not working.

And I'll be like, I know. Let's read these biographies of the Weather Underground founders together. Like, I'm just like, I, you know, let's read the history of... They're going to be like, well, that didn't end well for them either. Like, I know. So we're sort of stuck. I don't know. I'm kind of on the, like, violence works though. Like, it's like the sort of of stuck. I don't know. I'm kind of on the like violence works though. Like it's like the sort of Andrea Small, you know, like, like, I'm, I'm kind of like, I don't know, like you look, riots do work sometimes.

And there's like a reason the state has such an absolute monopoly on violence because it works, you know, like obviously it didn't the, the weather underground bombings didn't really do a lot for anyone, but like, I don't know, like, like that's what I think about when I have to answer for like this world that I believe in participating in and the ways that I've advocated for participating in it and what has happened, you know, with like being peaceful, like, I don't know, whatever. But with...

No, I look, I think this is fascinating because we did a whole series on the Weather Underground with Brendan Dean Dorn's son. And he interviewed his parents, he interviewed Bill Ayers and all of them. And the fascinating thing about the series is you both understand why they went down that path and you can also understand why at the end ultimately it doesn't it it it doesn't work not just because it's like not a good tactic but because what it does to the people how people end up being radicalized in that way like they sort of lose the sense of what is politically effective and like what is actually

gonna bring change and so it's like it's interesting it's also a little just it's dispiriting and that you're like okay well this isn't working that's not working like well the human ego implodes at all you know like for sure for sure and yet I mean I'm definitely like all of these all of these fuckers like in the like I'm like I'm for sure like done with propriety like I, I'm definitely like all of these all of these fuckers like in the like I'm like I'm for sure like done with propriety like I'm I'm I'm very much like these people should never know peace again. You know, like I'm not advocating for violence, but I'm like they should not know a nice meal

at a restaurant like please but but but the screen saying so I think this is one of the reasons that I noticed this feeling in my head and that I was trying to parse through it in this piece was that I was sort of like, okay, a thing that has worked for me for, I don't know, 25 years of being on the internet has been like, okay, the real world is more important to me than the internet. And the internet is this vast sort of like labyrinth, playground, then hellscape. But you know, all these things that's been to me in my life,

my entire professional realm, whatever, like it's enormous, but I'm a human animal and what's going on physically in front of me is more important. I kind of had the hope of passing that down as sort of just a vague rubric of how to handle it and just let the physical world feel realer to you than what was on a screen.

But then I started to lose my access to that being kind of an automatic instinct. And this being like a principle that's extremely important to me that I've talked about a ton that I try to like practice and reinforce in so many ways. And that, I mean, that is, but that is what I think, right? Like I think I want them to understand.

It is my only hope that they have something that absorbs them more than a screen does. It can just be a couple things, you know? It could be eco-terrorism, you know? It could be playing the guitar or it could be eco-terrorism. It could be any number of things. But it's like, as long as there's something that, you know, like, yeah, whatever, drawing.

Like it's sort of like, yes, like with my older one, I'm like, okay, well you really, like, she, I mean, she used to go to bed at nine. So like that girl has watched like us, a whole movie like every day of her life. I'm like 7.30, I'm done parenting. So like that girl has watched like us a whole movie, like every day of her life. I'm like 7.30, I'm done parenting. You know, like, I'm like, that's really, I'm tapping out, you know?

But it's like, she knows that it feels better to move around and to do things and to have her hands in things and to be outside and be with her friends, you know? And sort of like, maybe that's, maybe that is replicable. But then there was something about this hero I was like, I don't know, you can lose that pretty fast, especially as an adolescent,

especially as someone who's like sort of, you know, entire social experience is pre-mediated before you ever. I've been writing a piece about like how Gen Z is not having sex as much anymore or whatever. And, you know, I've been thinking about this in terms of young people that are a generation older than mine. How do you think about it with your kids on screens?

I mean, it's weird. There's almost like an envy when I'm watching Charlie now play, like, without screens, right? Because it's like the imagination is there and he's making up stories and he just loves being outside with his friends and he's running around. And then, you know, there are the times when, same with you, it's like, He's making up stories and he just loves being outside with his friends and he's running around.

And then, you know, there are the times when, same with you, it's like, okay, I got to stop parenting for like an hour. So here's your iPad and you could do YouTube kids and here's Miss Rachel and here's Blippi and whatever, there's Cocoa Melon, whatever, whatever, you know? And that's fine. And when he's done, you know, you can, as he's getting older, you can start to feel him being like, I just want to do like another half, you know, a little more time on the iPad, a little more time.

And I'm like, no, no more time. And if it- Oh, that's just starting for you? That's been, that's been. But it's like, it's hard to explain. I'm like, I've been telling him, I'm like, it's gonna, it will rot your brain. Oh yeah, you're like, you're like this?

You're like, no, no, no, no more phones. I'm like, no, you gotta turn it off. You gotta turn it off. What? That's exactly right. And he knows now. Now he takes my phone and he throws it, which is very funny.

But I guess the only thing I can think of is to spend as much time with them as possible without screens now to help them understand how fulfilling life can be without the screens and to like encourage the play dates and encourage the activities that get us outside, that get us out of the house, that get, you know, and we're in LA so it's helpful. We can like be outside a lot and he loves being outside. And to just sort of like stave it off as long as possible because I know it's coming.

Like I know there's going to be the moment when it's like, oh, everyone has a phone and I have a phone and everyone, you know, and then, and then that's it. But I feel like these are such formative years that maybe if we give them enough experience of reality without the screens, then it'll be something that stays with them. And I don't think that's going to be like, something that immunizes them

from something that is not just within your own personal choice. But maybe it'll give them a foundation. I do also think that there's a difference. Like right now, they don't really experience the internet as something that reads, that is surveilling them in the way that it actively surveils all of us. Like they, you know, probably all four of our kids might already have like that is surveilling them in the way that it actively surveils all of us. Yeah. Like they, you know, probably all four of our kids might already have like a data profile, like some sort of data matrix attached to, you know, like, who knows?

But they are not being read and targeted very specifically by the internet the way that an adolescent, a preteen and adolescent, or I mean, you know, even a, and it's like, like they're, when it's like, oh, here's Aladdin, you know, and you're gonna sit down and you're gonna watch Aladdin. And it's not like the, it's not like the sort of dynamic insanity of, of, you know, you're looking at something, we look at our phones and it looks back and it adjusts to, you know, to whatever, to like open

the wormhole in front of us. Like, I think I will be alarmed in a different way when I see how that actually works for them and like when it starts, when the internet starts acting back on them in a very active way. But right now I'm like, I'm loving. Here's Aladdin, you know? Like. Yeah, well, Charlie had this habit of he would, because he doesn't sleep and he, I wake up at 5 a.m. and then at 5.30 he comes down and he wants to sit on my lap in my office at home.

And I'm answering emails and he is watching YouTube. But I have had to like... That's when the algorithm, because then the video stops, and then it gives him another one, and then it gives him another one, and then we're watching the weirdest shit. Right, and YouTube's watching him back. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I was like, we gotta stop the autoplay, we gotta stop the algorithm, we gotta maximize it, so he doesn't look at the thumbnails and be like, I wanna watch this. Because you start to see the attention span shorten too. And he's like, I wanna watch this one, now I wanna watch this one.

Yeah. So, it's like, I want to watch this one. Now I want to watch this one. Yeah. So it's tough though. It's tough. But hopefully, you know, hopefully we can lead by example. Oh yeah, totally. I know I was like, what am I going to use for headline? Like the next time my brain breaks, you know? I was like, this won't be last.

Yeah, it can only break once. What's up? I know, I really blew my brain breaking load on this. It's gonna happen again. You talk about trying to convince your kids that the worthwhile parts of their minds are those which have resisted or eluded the incentives of the internet. What's keeping the worthwhile parts of your mind busy or at least fulfilled these days? I don't know.

Yeah, being physically face to face with people anytime you're doing it, right? Yeah. It's like, yeah, being outside, doing things, you know, like... Okay, what do I think? Actually, what do I mean by that? What do I mean by resisting the incentives of the internet? I think by that I mean self-surveillance. I think I mean sort of an inhuman consistency, like a narrowing and a siloing.

And so it's like being with friends, going out, like, just like unsurveilled experience, doing things in community groups, doing things at their school, you know? Like, the thing about what's going on right now is, it's like, I don't like the way that the internet harnesses extremely human things about us and makes it a sort of monetary use to like evil companies, right? Like you feel when you have a child that you know like the most humanly valuable

Moments are of no monetary use to anyone. They are Mostly unsurveilled. They are unrecorded like they're you know and I the times in my life when I have been most sort of operating in adherence to the incentive of the internet, like I am making myself like useful. I'm making myself monetizable. I'm making myself sort of like consistent and whatever. And like I, and it's like real pleasure. It's not monetizable.

It's almost always unsurveilled. It is of no use to anyone. It is not, and that is like why it's valuable. And I think that kind of relates to this civic thing too. There's a part of the back of my head that's always thinking about like, what forms can dissent take right now? And what are the meaningful ones?

And I'm trying to, like, what could be, what can elude capture? What could elude the bad kind of capture? And what kind of, yeah, I think I'm trying to think even in the realm of disobedience rather than dissent even. And like that's, yeah even in the realm of disobedience rather than dissent even. Yeah. And like that's, yeah, so the parts of me that are resisting the incentives of the internet

are the parts that are unrecorded, disobedient, pleasure-focused, and just there, like in the world. And yeah. I think about that a lot. And for me, talking about ways to dissent and organize in person with other people without screens and knowing that some of it is going to be clumsy, some of it is going to be silly, some of it

is going to be like, that's not realistic at all, but we're all talking about it. We can connect about it. Like I know that I always feel better after those conversations, whether it's effective or not, like, you know, that's a larger conversation. But again, that gets that pulls you into that utilitarian space that the internet does where it's like, we've got to figure out something that's like immediately effective.

It's like, yeah, ultimately we do, but we also like the sort of the best ideas come when you are connecting with other human beings and trying to figure something out together. And usually that's a lot more valuable than trying to figure something out on your own in your own brain with your device in your hand. Yeah, it's as simple as just like a lack of mediation and compliance. And it's like, and maybe that's like, yeah, I feel like that's, those are kind of the vectors that I hope can be operative with my kids, you know? That like, I want them to have a have a physical sense of that, that what they want actually may be just to get rid of all of the forms of mediation that will present them,

present themselves to our children at age 11 is like actually it's so much easier to just like do this all over text. It's like I want them to learn like no, you know, like it's better to hang out. Yeah, and it's and it might not be easier but it's going to feel better afterwards. Yeah. Gia, thank you so much as always. I think we figured it all out. As usual, we figured it out. We'll do this every couple years until we fix the internet.

It's going to be great. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, email us at offline at crooked.com. And if you're as opinionated as we are, please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. For ad-free episodes of Offline in Podsave America, exclusive content and more, join our friends at the pod subscription community at crooked.com slash friends. And if you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel.

Don't forget to follow Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok and the other ones for original content, community events, and more. The show is mixed and sound edited by Dan Farrell. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Siglund. Dallon Villanueva produces our videos each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, and Adrian Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Thank you.