Offline with Jon Favreau - Margaret Atwood on Good, Evil and Stupidity

Episode Date: March 12, 2023

Margaret Atwood, famed author, poet and “dystopia prophet,” joins Offline to talk about fighting tyranny and finding hope. Much like her latest book, Old Babes in the Wood, Atwood’s conversation with Jon sandwiches her thoughts and fears on the present between poignant chapters of the past. They discuss censorship, religion, parenting and how to listen for what you can’t hear. 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.

Well, everybody thinks that there's no privacy and that everything's public, but that's not actually true. It's only true if you go on the Internet. If you don't go on it, things are different. Okay. But this erosion of privacy in the individual was happening long before. It used to be called getting your house bugged or not knowing who is a spy. So if you can keep off your phone for one second, then you can have some moments of privacy. I'm trying. I'm trying.

You're trying. I'm Jon Favreau, welcome to Offline. Hey everyone, my guest today is legendary Canadian author and poet Margaret Atwood. Margaret has been called the prophet of dystopia, which unfortunately for us has become increasingly accurate. Over the course of 18 novels, 9 story collections, and 18 books of poetry, Atwood has shown an eerie ability to predict the creeping spread of theocracy and totalitarianism, most notably with her 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, which rocketed back into the public consciousness after the election of Donald Trump and a TV adaption. A couple weeks ago, she wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled,

Go Ahead and Ban My Book, where she takes on the Madison County, Virginia school board, which recently banned The Handmaid's Tale from its schools. In the piece, Atwood argues that in a digital age, no book ban will actually keep her writing out of the hands of curious teenage students. It felt like a perfect offline conversation, so I invited Margaret on to talk about it. But of course, because this is Margaret Atwood, the conversation became so I invited Margaret on to talk about it. But of course, because this is Margaret Atwood, the conversation became so much more. We talked about the global struggle between democracy and autocracy, the way religion is used to justify tyranny, and the challenge of fighting extremism without compromising democratic principles. We also talked about the way fiction is evolving, what makes morally ambiguous characters compelling,

and why in her new story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, she wrote about introducing George Orwell to the Internet. For being a prophet of dystopia, Margaret Atwood was quite fun and surprisingly hopeful. She even talked about building a utopia. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please take the time to rate, review, and share the show with a friend. Here's Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood, welcome to Offline. A pleasure to be here.

I want to start with the big question about the state of the world. So there's obviously quite a bit to worry about these days, particularly if you're a fan of democracy. But I've also seen an argument recently that 2022 was the year democracy fought back. Ukraine still standing, Europe stronger, Le Pen lost, Bolsonaro lost, Trump's candidates lost in our midterms. And I wonder, as someone who's thought and wrote a lot about the struggle between democracy and autocracy, how do you think we're doing right now? but there are certainly in these states that are banning books. And what is this nutty new law that you have to register if you have a blog and you're mentioned anybody in government in Florida? What kind of a Soviet Union thing is that? Yeah, some kooky Republican legislator introduced that bill.

Well, it wouldn't be a good thing. In fact, it would be practically a 1930s Soviet Union kind of thing. So if that's really where they want to go, maybe they should read a bit of history. Yes, it's very strange. But I would say people are, now that they've popped out of their slumber and realized they can't take any of this for granted, I would say that they are fighting back. What do you think are some of the conditions that gave rise to this latest wave of authoritarianism, not just in the United States, but all over the world? When conditions are unstable, and conditions are unstable, and they're partly unstable because of floods and especially droughts, lower harvests, food shortages, that destabilizes things.

You have some form of civil unrest, and there is a great inclination to topple governments and try to replace them with something else that people fondly hope will do better. So I think it's unstable conditions that create anger and desperation. And then political actors either try to increase that to make it really, really unstable, or they say things like, I alone can fix it. And people believe them, right, because they're desperate. When Russia first invaded Ukraine, there was this debate about whether Putin would be able to make the shift from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, you know, and for people that don't know. He's doing pretty well. Yeah. Well, that's so he's doing better making that shift than he is on the battlefield. And I wonder, like, what have you learned about how people come to support or at least tolerate totalitarian regimes like what Russia is becoming

or has become? They don't want to be shot in the back of the head. So it's fear. It's fear. So it's fear and also exodus. So all the people who might be opposed to this kind of behavior get out if they can, leaving behind those that have no power, those that are collaborators and supporters because they're getting something out of it, and those who are just afraid because these regimes don't fool around. When I was talking about The Handmaid's Tale early on,

people were saying, well, why didn't they have a big street march? Well, why didn't they resist? Well, why didn't they do this and that? And we would never blah, blah. And I said, you don't understand these regimes. They will kill you. They're not into fairness and accommodation

or any of that kind of thing. They wish to eliminate the opposition. And if you are resisting publicly, you are the opposition and you will be killed or exiled or put in jail or something like that. Yeah. What about the people who don't just sort of tolerate the regime out of fear of what might happen to them, but sort of actively participate in totalitarianism?

Something in it for them. Yeah, there's always jobs to be had, you know, prison guards and, you know, camp supervisors and jobs like that. And there will always be people willing to take those jobs so handmaid's tale people said oh why why were women helping to control other women answer read some history it's how colonial regimes worked they they recruited people from the countries that they were dominating. And there were always, you know, if you can get some better pay and put food on the table. A lot of people will take that.

Thank you very much. You've said that Handmaid's Tale was influenced in part by your experiences in several countries behind the Iron Curtain in the mid 80s. What did you see there that shaped your thinking? What did I not see there? What did I not hear there? So it's not just what you see and hear, it's what you don't see and hear. I'll give you a very small example. It was in Poland, 1984.

They had a big book festival. And there were a lot of very beautifully illustrated children's books. And I said, why are there so very many beautifully illustrated children's books? And they said, think about it. Are you thinking about it? I am. Do you have the answer? I don't. Not political. Less likely to be controversial. That was then. Now children's books can be quite controversial in the United States, but stories of happy little bunny rabbits in Poland in 1984, you were unlikely to get shot in the back of the head for that. Or another example, let's go out into the middle of this field. It says Czechoslovakia. Why are we going out into the middle of the field? Because people are not going to talk to you in a room. They're not going to talk to you in a hotel.

They're not going to talk to you in a car. We assumed that all of those were bugged. So out we went into the middle of the field, and then I heard some things that I could not then repeat or write about because that would get people into trouble. Wow. Okay, so it's what you're not seeing and hearing, but you are maybe seeing and hearing in a field. Yeah. Or other example, 1989, it's Berlin. The wall is coming down right at that moment. The surly, unpleasant East German border guards that we had encountered in 1984, it's the same people. Now they're smiley, happy, and friendly.

They're handing out cigars. They're getting their pictures taken. People are selling pieces of the wall, colored pieces with graffiti on them, more expensive. We're launching Handmaid's Tale, the movie. We launch it in West Berlin first. The after party is filled with aesthetic conversations. The acting, the directing, the set design, the script, and all of the things you talk about when you talk about movies, usually, if you're not in a totalitarian regime. Then we go across into East Berlin and we show it in the theater there.

And this is the first time such a thing has happened since before the war, okay? Since Germany was divided. Very attentive audience. Very, very attentive. Really concentrating. Then lots of bouquets are thrown up onto the stage, and people do not have aesthetic conversations. They have political conversations.

First time they've been able to have a political conversation for a long time. And what they say is, this was our life. They don't mean the outfits. They mean the fact that you could not trust anybody. You never knew who you were talking to. You never knew if your next door neighbor was snitching on you. You didn't know any of that. And if you saw that film a while ago called The Lives of Others, that was very much the flavor of East Germany before that wall came down. You've said that you made Gilead a theocracy because of America's puritanical roots. And clearly a lot of totalitarian regimes still use religion, religious imagery, religious rhetoric.

Why do you think that still works today at a time when people in most countries have become less religious over the last several years? You'd think they've become less religious over the last several years? You'd think they've become less religious. They may have become less traditionally religious. Have you noticed the boom in astrology and tarot cards? Interesting, yeah. And the absolute cultism of the interest in health, health, what you're eating, what you're putting into your body. It's like people have got little shrines to their own bodies at which they worship daily. So let me put it to you that I think the religious impulse is very, very, very, very, very old and was probably an evolutionary plus

and to some extent probably still is. So let us suppose that most people have an inherent tendency to believe in something bigger than themselves, whether that be a standard religion of the kinds that we know or whether it be my daily horoscope. Yeah, the planet Venus is taking a personal interest in me. Hooray. Yeah, so as a teenager, I went around to every religion I could get my hands on

to see what they were doing in there, including the Spiritualist Church, which at that point was a lot of quite OLD people. But they, the word that shall not be spoken. Yes, and they had their own hymn book. They'd rewritten standard hymns, but with their own words. And they had their own rituals and procedures. And they had a medium on hand at every meeting of the spiritualist church. And their belief in something bigger than themselves was that there was an afterlife and their loved ones were in it taking a personal interest in them and sending them messages which were never very helpful, I have to say. It was never like what horse to bet on or which dog to buy.

It was things like, be careful going down the stairs on Thursday. These are useful things. You should be careful going down the stairs on any day of the week. Thursdays in particular, it seems. Yeah, a little good advice. So let us pretend that there is an inherent tendency to believe in something bigger than yourself. And it's almost impossible to think of yourself as dead, because you are still a noun in a sentence that contains you. You say, I will be dead. There's still an I. There's not a nothing, right? It's kind of built into language and probably to our deep past. So my feeling about religion is if we're going to have them, which we are, let's have good and less harmful ones.

But there will always be people taking advantage and persuading other people that they've got the real insight and the truth and give me some money, please. Yeah, and using it as sort of a galvanizing force for political movements. Well, in the scammy area, that just impacts your money. But in the political area, then people try to harness that and use it for a political advantage for their own side. But is this what Jesus meant? Not if you read the red parts in the Bibles that have got the words of Jesus in red.

Not a word. Nothing about gay people. Thing on women, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Double dare you, nobody threw a stone. And you can find the golden rule in just about every religion that exists on earth. Well, so why doesn't anybody pay attention to it? I don't know. I guess we all have the capacity for good and evil, right? Without a doubt. You forgot the third because there's three. Good, evil, and stupidity. Yeah, we're swimming in that right now. So I spent a good part of my life thinking about the political power of storytelling.

First thing President Obama and I would do when we sat down to work on a speech together was figure out the story he wanted to tell, because he believed that storytelling was the only real chance to persuade people. Totalitarians usually have a simple, compelling story. I can make all our problems go away if we just make those people go away who are bad and different right yeah there's always of those people yeah it's always of those people yeah do you think that democracies have a simple compelling story to tell well they did during the cold war uh and the simple story was we aren't them three words yeah and then we got the fall of the wall which i've described in riveting detail and then we got people saying end of history which i personally never believed do you remember remember that game called pick up sticks where you throw this pile of sticks on the table, and you're supposed to remove the sticks without making any of the others move?

It was almost impossible, because when you have a static, let us say, chessboard, and you move one of the pieces, say the wall comes down, everything else moves. So you move one stick and pick up sticks, and a lot of other sticks move. So during the 90s, when people were happily going shopping and saying end of history and capitalism won and hooray for us and things like that, the pieces were all moving around, but people weren't paying attention. And then came 9-11, and the pieces all moved around again. And then came the financial meltdown of 2008, and the pieces all moved around again. And we have a great big piece that's moving around, and that would be climate changes leading to droughts, floods, low harvests, food shortages, and anger. So there are a lot of pieces in motion right now. What is the compelling story to tell? I think the compelling story to tell right now is there is hope. Because that's what people ask me about a lot. Is there hope?

There is hope. So I would say the creation of the new jobs in these sort of angry, deprived areas is a hopeful thing to do. The measures that people have already taken in respect to climate change, it's a slightly hard story because the story is things would be a lot worse if we hadn't done those things, which is true. And they've got the stats on that. So yes, we haven't done enough. But if we hadn't done anything, it would be a lot worse. I mean, if you want to do the scare thing, do you really want your Medicaid, Social Security, and new jobs to be taken away from you? Yeah. It's interesting because sometimes I wonder if just the defenders of democracy have a more difficult story to tell when it's not purely in opposition to, you know, the villain of the era like we were with the Soviet Union. And part of the reason I

wonder if it's complicated is because what we're trying to do is stitch together this extremely diverse array of people from different backgrounds in different places. We do this in the United States, but also now that we're sort of a global economy, we're doing it worldwide. And it is much easier to get people to fear one another than it is for people to give one another a chance, particularly at a time of dwindling resources. Well, that's a big one. Are we really at a time of dwindling resources yeah well i was thinking about i was thinking about climate change there and what it's doing we did a program in the fall called practical utopias oh yeah i read about yeah okay so having been a victorianist not a victorian i would be very old if I had been a Victorian rather than just OLD.

The mandate was this. You shall create a material world that is carbon neutral or carbon negative, scalable, that is inexpensive enough so people can do it, and attractive enough so they will want to do it. So no, everybody has to eat nothing but tofu. So it has to be carbon neutral or carbon negative,

scalable, and attractive enough. And then the second half was the social half. Who's going to make the decisions? Like what form of government shall you have? And each form has got pluses and minuses. There are no free lunches in any of this, but you're aiming for the least expensive lunch. So what is the material cost of building

your, quite frequently, dome house made out of hempcrete? What is the cost of a hereditary monarchy? What's the downside of a tyranny, say a benevolent dictatorship? How fast does it take that to become not benevolent? Usually pretty fast. What about a democracy? What are the weaknesses? What are the strengths? What kind of democracy are you talking about? So they had to work all of that out. Are you going to have a police system? If you aren't, what happens if people disagree with you and break the rules? What are you going to do? Things like that. I even threw in corpse disposal, thinking they would shy away from corpse disposal.

But they were right there with the corpse disposal. They were on it. They had it all figured out. What system of government came out on top? Oh, they had various circles of decision-making. But remember, there were eight teams, and you can see the results. There's a link that you can go to, and you can look. None of them wanted a tyranny, strangely enough.

And they had to think about things like health care and education and what about old people and all of these things. And they had to think about things like healthcare and education and what about old people and all of these things. And they threw themselves into it. We had facilitators in case they fought too much. And we had illustrators to draw pictures of what they came up with. And I was very, very impressed with them. I thought they would give up a lot sooner. These are complicated issues. You know, so you're going to do the hemp creep creep where are you going to get the hemp like that uh and i'm here to tell you that there's a lot of new materials coming on stream and a lot of new ways of making things and mushrooms are going to be big in our future so we say lack of resources, but maybe we've been looking at the wrong resources.

Do we really have a lack of resources? Is our feeling about that based on earlier ways of doing things? And are there other newer ways of doing things that would solve some of these problems? Mushrooms, for instance, can dissolve plastics and clean up oil spills and be turned into fabrics. Somebody sent me a very nice mushroom hat. It's not my size, but it's very nice. I mean, one thing that's hopeful about this is it seems when you focus people on practical decision making that could improve their lives and the lives of their community and sort of set aside preconceived ideologies, you end up with a more sort of productive outcome. Very productive outcomes. But of course, this was a self-selected bunch. There are people who wanted to do this.

There would be a lot of other people who wouldn't want to do this. And there's a huge number of people who wouldn't have the time to do this because they're running very hard just to put food on the table and have some kind of an abode. Yeah. You wrote a piece in The Atlantic last month about a Virginia school board banning Handmaid's Tale. And at one point you wrote in this piece, Here I would point out that attempts to control media content are as likely to come from the so-called left as from the so-called right, each side claiming to act in the name of the public good. Where does that show up today, the left sort of attempting to control content?

Well, that's a great big discussion, isn't it? We've had it here a few times. Yeah. So I think you'd have to go into the washroom with some people who work at media companies, swear that your phone is turned off and ask them to tell you the real truth. Yeah. So a certain amount of self-selection goes on there. And that is why there are all these spinoffs like podcasts and sub stacks and other things that are not subject to editorial policy of that particular kind. But everybody, and this is just a human thing, so pretend you're a Viking.

You're going to go on a Viking raid and you need some Vikings to go with you. You're going to choose Vikings that are pals of yours and that you can trust. Are you not? Oh, yeah, for sure. So people select in that way. They select groups of people to work with who are copacetic with them. And that's why Practical Utopias was such an interesting experiment because none of these people knew one another. They're going to have to get along and trust one another even though they did not know one another. They're going to have to get along and trust one another, even though they did not know one another. But mostly, we congregate into groups of people who agree with us. And that happens on both sides of the equation. We have been through, I would say, a period of

extreme moral panics. I think we're coming out of the end of the tunnel, and that would be on the left. I think the extreme moral panic is now setting in on the right, because when you have Tucker Carlson saying that he really hates Donald Trump and that news becomes public, you're going to get some panic going on there. Well, one thing I hear a lot from friends on the left is the real extremism right now is on the right. The Republican Party has become more extreme. Donald Trump, you know, sent out a tweet, series of tweets. Without a doubt, sure, this is all true. Violent insurrection. Yeah. Right. So then the next sentence is, therefore, you should give us a free pass and all the shit that we've been doing well it's not even that it's like well we have to have a strategy and tactics that stop that extremism and then you know it's someone getting canceled isn't as dangerous as some of the hate speech that's on the rise towards marginalized people.

And maybe we do want to take down the Trump tweets, even if we don't like them, because they are inciting violence. And one thing I always struggle with is and I have in this Trump era is like, how do you calibrate an effective response to extremism that doesn't compromise the democratic principles that you're fighting for. Okay, instead of using the word progressive, why don't they use the word fair? Yeah. Why is that? The word progressive and progress, there's some baggage there. So eugenics was once considered a progressive movement in the name of which a number of women got sterilized against their wills,

stuff like that. And I remember from my childhood, you can't stop progress. And what that usually meant was we're going to do something you don't like, but it's progress. Hey, you can't stop it. So I'm fairly allergic to those words, and I would like to see people just talking about what is fair. And since anybody's real audience in the United States, the people you really have to convince are the independents.

Because it's parti-pri, it's sides chosen on the other extremes. You're not going to get them to change their minds. Their minds are made up. But it's people in the middle who are looking at this, they're looking at that. Well, who's representing that reasonable middle where I'm not going to get shot in the back of the head. That's what they're looking for. And what is going to actually work? What is going to be fair?

What is going to make it so that I can walk down the street without people yelling at me? This kind of thing. Well, and in a way, it's even more important to convince those people in times of extremism and rising authoritarianism. Those people are always under attack at times of extremism and rising authoritarianism because they are the people that each side wishes to convert. So once you hear people saying, you're either for me or you're against me, you know you're talking to an extremist. Yeah. You've written that in times of extremism and polarization like these, fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity. I interviewed Chimamanda Adichie for this podcast

and she told me that she's worried that literature is becoming flat and boring because people are afraid to write about morally complex subjects and characters. Do you ever feel that? What do you think about that? Oh, I think about that all the time, but I'm too old to give a hoot. So I will continue to write about morally ambiguous characters because that's the truth. That's the truth about people. Everyone has a shadow side. Sometimes the shadow side is very unpleasant. Sometimes it's

just a well of doubt and confusion, but everyone has one. And to leave that out. So I sometimes say to people, okay, so I'm going to write a novel in which everybody is well behaved all the time. And very, very nice. Would you read it? No, it doesn't sound like an Atwood novel, that's for sure. It does not. It's a novel by Richardson and it's called Sir Charles Grandison and it's 600 pages long. So a novel of the 18th century. So he wrote a book called Pamela, in which an upper class guy tries to seduce the servant maid and fails, ends up marrying her. Then he wrote one called Clarissa, in which the woman does get seduced and gives birth to twins and dies, also seduced by an

aristocratic person. Then a deputation of aristocrats comes to him and says, we're not all bad. We're not all like that. We want you to write a, you think I'm making this up, don't you? I'm not. We want you to write a novel in which an aristocrat behaves well, like most of us, because we behave well. And he says, okay.

And he does. He writes Sir Charles Grandison, which starts off very promisingly with the heroine almost getting kidnapped by highwaymen. But Sir Charles Grandison steps in and rescues her as he would. And off they go to his country house, in which he has some very nice sisters who act as chaperones. And the rest of the 600 pages is all about good things

that Sir Charles Grandison does. And I'm the only person who's actually finished this book because I'm very cynical. And I keep waiting for the point where we go down to the cellar and find out that he's running a coin forgery or that he's got some female vampires chained to pillars in the cellar. Nothing. We just keep going. He just keeps being good. And that's why I'm the only person who's ever finished this. So, yeah, it's number one, not interesting, but number two, not true. He must have done something bad.

Did he ever even get just a little bit drunk? Apparently not. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. It's funny. It's something I've been thinking about a lot when I have a two-and-a-half-year-old. Oh, boy. I know. Yeah. And he demands that I tell him stories every night before bed. And so at first, you want to shield a child from anything that's bad out there, right? That's like the first

instinct of a parent when the child is young. And so I'm telling only happy stories. And he's sort of bored by the happy stories. And you do have to start. I'm realizing that the stories that I tell where there's some conflict or there's some drama or there's someone's acting badly, you know, like those are the stories that he wants to hear because that's what the human condition is. And I guess we're sort of programmed to find that more interesting than the 600 pages you just spoke about. Okay. So it alerts us to the truth that there are dangers out there. And those kinds of stories prepare us for the fact that there are dangers out there and maybe give us some coping mechanisms. But also children are always told to behave themselves and be good. So stories about people not behaving themselves and not being good are quite told to behave themselves and be good. So stories about people not behaving themselves and not being good are quite compelling to them. Here's a story from my life.

So I had a little four-and-a-half, five-year-old who was up in my room where I had a bookshelf, and it was mostly poetry and essays and stuff. And he said, I want you to read something from one of your books. And the only thing I could think of was Stephen King's book on writing, which is, by the way, pretty good. Okay. So I seem to remember that there was something about Stephen King as a child.

And I thought, well, this will be interesting. So I start reading and find myself in the middle of the anecdote in which he has this babysitter from hell who was locked in the coat cupboard where he's thrown up on his mother's shoes. And my little child is going, his eyes are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then he says, read that again. Read that again. He'd never heard of such a thing.

I was an aficionado of Grimm's Fairy Tales unexpurgated versions, and they're pretty tough. It's the ones with the wrenched-out eyeballs and red-hot nails and pretty gruesome things, you know, heads falling down the chimney and what have you. Some children don't like those. My sister didn't like them. The only one that she liked was the 12 Dancing Princesses, which ends well

and has a lot of party frocks in it. But I was up for the pets falling down the chimney. So how do you think the internet has changed the craft of writing and the challenge of storytelling? This is something I've been thinking about a lot. Novel writing? Story writing? Not so much. been thinking about a lot. Novel writing? Story writing? Not so much.

Book promotion? A lot. So it's in the area of dissemination. It's the area of dissemination where it has changed a lot. And do you put ads in newspapers or do you do social media and i remember when one of my publishers had a social media expert who was who had an office that was basically a closet but their domain has expanded you may have noticed that yeah yeah so the other thing they do is they they put people up to doing this and some of them just don't like it very much

and others get bombarded and all the usual things that happen. But I got onto Twitter by accident back in 2009 at a point where my publishers thought I was a nut to be doing it. We all are. It's okay. We're all a nut. We're all nuts. Everyone on Twitter, we're all are. It's okay. We're all a nut.

We're all nuts. Everyone on Twitter, we're all nuts. I mean, one of the stories in your new book, Old Babes in the Wood, is an interview between you and a deceased George Orwell, where you touch on the internet telling him that even though it started with good intentions, its effect has been to collapse privacy and erode the notion of the individual. Why do you think the internet has eroded the notion of the individual? Well, everybody thinks that there's no privacy and that everything's public, but that's not actually true. It's only true if you go on the internet. If you don't go on it, things are different. Okay. But this erosion of privacy in the individual was happening long before. Remember I told you about going out into a field in 1984. So it used to be called getting your house bugged or not knowing who is a spy. So, yes, we've been snooping on one another like forever.

And it's even in the Bible, snooping. So before invading something, they send spies, right? Of course, like any normal person would. Yeah, so all of that, you aren't who you say you are, impostors, scams, lying, snooping, all of this has been going on for a very long time indeed. You can go back to the reign of Elizabeth I and look at her spy network, which was quite extensive. Yeah. And now it's all of us all the time spying on each other. Well, I wouldn't say that. You know, I don't think that's true.

It's all of you all the time if that's where you want to be. Yeah, that's true. So if you can keep off your phone for one second, then you can have some moments of privacy. I'm trying. I'm trying. I'm trying. You're trying. Yeah, it's an ongoing effort now. A lot of the stories in Old Babes in the Wood are about sort of looking back and the wisdom that comes with age.

What do you want young people to know that you wish you knew? Oh, you can't tell them anything. You know that. So skipping over. I do. believe me. Because they need to find out for themselves, and their times are different from yours. So among the Inuit, they have a custom, which is old people don't give advice unless they are asked. Okay?

So I have a piece in my book of essays called Burning Questions called Polonia. And the ask was exactly what you just asked me. What advice would you give young people? The answer is none. Unless they ask. So I am a sort of unstoppable advice giver. I didn't put it in the piece, but I was in a supermarket and there were two guys and they were discussing the fact that their dishwasher

wasn't working. And I said, without being asked, have you changed the filter? And they said, there's a filter yeah so sometimes your advice is helpful but if it's young people they will not hear it unless they have asked well I am definitely not a young person anymore I'm 41 but I am at the age where I am 41 is a mere nothing I am at the age where I'm young enough to want advice for the next half of my life, hopefully, but old enough to know that

I don't know everything anymore. You don't. Do you have any good advice? Yeah, we used to have a sign on our refrigerator that went something like, tired of putting up with your stupid parents? Move out, get a job while you still know everything. I like that. But that's for teenagers. Oh, yes, I remember being a teenager. I knew everything. But it wears off.

It wears off. It certainly does. But 41 with a young child. So you need probably to be on a parent blog. They will give you lots of advice. They do. Too much advice. Too much advice. Yeah.

Hard to curate that. Yeah. Before taking in any advice, you need to know what you need to know. You need to know what kind of advice to ask for. And it's usually pretty specific, is it not? What do I do if my kid does fill in the blank? What if my kids keep sticking beans up his nose? I don't know the answer to that one, but it happens. Yeah, it certainly does. So you get surprised every day with a kid.

Yes, you can't tell them not to do something if you haven't anticipated this thing that they're about to do. I never thought they would do that. Which happens literally every day to us. You said on the Today Show this week that you're writing a memoir. What made you decide to do that? Oh, I got in a lot of trouble for saying that. Were you not supposed to? Don't for saying that don't say that don't say that don't say that yes we want it to be a surprise well it's not a surprise uh but i'm not supposed to say anything about it okay so here's me not saying anything

about it well i well I had to try. I had to try. I'll be eager to read it. So will I. First I'll have to write it, won't I? That's right. There's a small thing in there. Margaret Atwood,

thank you so much for joining Offline. This was wonderful and I appreciate your time and your wisdom. A pleasure for me and good luck. Thank you so much. Especially wait till they get to the age of four. Oh boy. Then you're in trouble.

I know it. I'm prepared. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show.

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