Fresh Air - Best Of: Louis Armstrong's Early Years / Our Anti-Social Century

Episode Date: February 22, 2025

We talk with author Ricky Riccardi about how Louis Armstrong became the first Black pop star and provided the foundation of improvisation for other musicians. Riccardi's book is Stomp Off, Let's Go. Also, we hear from Atlantic writer Derek Thompson. He's done a deep dive into our nation's loneliness epidemic and how our phones have become a barrier to real human connection.Critic-at-large John Powers reviews the Brazilian film I'm Still Here. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Tanya Mosley with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, how Louis Armstrong became the first black pop star and provided the foundation of improvisation for other musicians. You can name a million great vocalists and a million great instrumentalists and Armstrong is the only person who totally changed the way people sang and he totally changed the way people soloed and played music on their instruments. We talk with Ricky Riccardi, author of Stomp Off! Let's Go! The Early Years of Louis Armstrong.

And we also hear from writer Derek Thompson. He's done a deep dive into our nation's loneliness epidemic and how our phones have become a barrier to real human connection. His recent article in the Atlantic is called The Anti-Social Century. Also, critic-at-large John Powers reviews the Brazilian film I'm Still Here. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

The Anti-Social Century Donald Trump is back in the White House and making a lot of moves very quickly. Keep track of everything going on in Washington with the NPR Politics Podcast. Every day we break down the latest news and explain why it matters to you. The NPR Politics Podcast. Listen every day. When she teaches her students how to write a song, musician Scarlett Keys says they need

to ask themselves certain questions. What is the thing that keeps you up at night? What's the thing you can't stop thinking about? As songwriters, we are repurposing human tropes and a new viewpoint with new words, with new music. The people and technology behind the soundtracks of our lives. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR. My defining characteristic for him is love. I'm Jesse Thorne on Bullseye Kelsey Grammar on the thing that makes Frazier, Frazier. That he loves so deeply that it almost harpoons him.

Plus sideshow Bob, cheers, and so much more on Bullseye for MaximumFun.org and NPR. Bella DiPaolo is glad if you're happily married, but she is perfectly happy being single. I would love to have someone who took care of my car or someone who cleaned up the dishes after dinner, but then I'd want them to leave. From yourself to your dog to your spouse are significant others. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley. Terry has our first interview. I'll let her introduce it. Here's a question for you. Who do you think was the first black pop star? The

answer is Louis Armstrong, according to one of the leading experts on Armstrong's life and music, my guest Ricky Riccardi. He's just published his third book about Armstrong. This one is about Armstrong's early years, his rough childhood, his first recordings with other bands, and his famous first recordings with his own group, the Hot Five and Hot Seven. As Riccardi points out, those two early groups that Armstrong led, recorded between 1926 and 28 over the course of 25 months, those recordings have been studied by up and coming musicians around the world because they provide the foundational language necessary to master

the art of improvisation. For instrumental soloists and vocalists, Riccardi says Armstrong's innovations as both a trumpeter and vocalist set the entire soundtrack of the 20th century in motion. Riccardi has been the director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum since 2009. It's the world's largest archive focusing on one musician. It gave Riccardi access to previously inaccessible documents including 700 hours of Armstrong recordings of his thoughts and his music, the unedited and unsweetened version of his autobiography, and several chapters of an unpublished autobiography

by his second wife, Lil Hardin, who was also the pianist in the Hot Five. She wrote or co-wrote several songs Armstrong recorded, and was instrumental in landing his first recording date. Through writing about Armstrong, Riccardi's new book has a lot to say about segregation in New Orleans in the first part of the 20th century.

The new book is called Stomp Off Let's Go, which is the title of a song he recorded with another band led by Erskine Tate. Ricky Riccardi, welcome to Fresh Air. What a joy it was to do the research for this, you know, being forced to listen again to Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. I love Armstrong's recordings, particularly like the ones through the 1940s. But you've heard about all of them, like his whole life of recordings. So let's start with one of his great recordings. And this is West End Blues. And it's what you

describe as one of the most iconic recordings of the 20th century. Tell us why. I mean, for me, this is kind of everything you need to know about Louis Armstrong in three minutes. Actually, it's probably everything you need to know about him in the first 13 seconds, because that unaccompanied opening trumpet cadenza, people are still learning it. I mean, during the height of the pandemic, there was a hashtag Louis Armstrong West End Blues Challenge,

and it had musicians around the world trying to nail that cadenza. But then the rest of the recording, the way he plays the melody, the way he scat sings, the operatic trumpet playing at the ending, it was really his announcement to the world that he is here, he has arrived, and nothing will ever be the same. All right, we need to hear it. So here's West End Blues. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm.

I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm. So that was West End Blues, one of Louis Armstrong's early recordings. What year was it, Ricky? 1928.

Okay. So why do you consider Armstrong the first black pop star? So the records he makes in the 1920s, which are at the heart of Stomp Off Let's Go, they were known at the time as race records, records aimed at cities and urban areas and the black community in general. And a lot of blues and a lot of instrumental jazz. But West End Blues, it wasn't a runaway pop hit, you know. That was still the terrain of Paul Whiteman and Guy Lombardo and band leaders like that. But it did move the needle a little bit. People were buying it, they were listening,

they were influenced. And OK Records, Armstrong's label at the time, their head A&R man, his name was Tommy Rockwell, he was the one who kind who had the brainchild, like, man, this Armstrong guy has got something different. If we could just get him to connect with the larger public, he really has a chance to be a star. So beginning in late 1928,

Rockwell starts expanding the sound of Armstrong's band, and he starts simultaneously releasing his recordings as race records and as pop records. And lo and behold, the pop records were selling. So in 1929, Armstrong comes to New York and begins his reign as a full-blown pop artist for OK, recording things like, "'I Can't Give You Anything But Love'

and "'Ain't Misbehavin'' and "'When You're Smiling'." And by 1932, he's the biggest selling recording artist in the entire industry. And so at that point, you know, the race record experiment is over, and Louis Armstrong is the first black pop star. Well, I want to play a song that made him a star, and that's He Be Gee Bees from 1926. It's a Hot 5 recording.

And it's considered the first example of scat, at least the first time it was called scat. So the story that's always told is that Armstrong started singing syllables, scat, instead of words because he dropped the sheet music and didn't remember the words. There's other versions of the story of how he started scatting.

Which do you think is the most authentic story? So to my ears, and also to Johnny St. Cyr, the banjo player, he did corroborate the dropping of the sheet music things. People have always said that that story was too good to be true, but if you listen carefully, there is a little bit, I don't want to call it panic, but in the first vocal chorus towards the end, Armstrong sings something that almost sounds like you don't, Debo, right? It's kind of gibberish, but in my mind, at that point, he might have dropped the lyrics,

and he didn't quite know what to do next. But this whole concept of using his voice like an instrument, people remember that he was doing that in his vocal quartet when he was 11, 12 years old. One musician, Norman Mason, remembered him doing that on the riverboats with Fait Marable in 1920. Another musician remembered him doing that in New York with Fletcher Henderson in 1924. So this whole concept of wordless vocalizing was something he had done and Armstrong himself

said, you know, these things just come to you in a flash. So he did not spend much time planning, like I'm going to do this on Heebie-Jeebies. But in the moment with the sheet of paper on the ground, he just launches into this entire chorus, completely wordless and by the end, he's throwing sweet mama and things you normally don't hear in 1920s pop music.

But if you continue listening to the end of the track, there's a moment where they had worked out a thing where they would play a Charleston beat and everybody would say a line, what you doing with the heebies? And Kid Ori, the trombone player, he comes in at the wrong time. And even Armstrong himself, he admitted that he thought that they would try it again. But EA Fern, who was the producer for OK of this particular recording, he came in and said, we're going to take a chance on this one. And so even with the imperfections and all this stuff,

they knew that that vocal had something different. And Fern was the man that Armstrong gave credit for using the word scat. And in the book, I have a cover of the sheet music from later 1926. It's spelled S-K-A-T. But even though you can find other instances of wordless vocalizing on record before heebie-jeebies, for all intents and purposes, this is the record that really puts scat singing on the map. Okay so let's listen to this 1926 recording of Louis Armstrong's Hot 5, his first scatting on record and this is He Be Gee Bees. I've got the heebie, I mean the jeebies talking about

That there's a heebie jeebie shoe, see, of course it's boy Kiss it with a little bit of joy, say, don't you know it You don't know about, don't feel blue Someone will teach you, come on, and do that dance They call the heebie jeebie dance, yes ma'am Papa's got the hebe Jeepers dance. Hey, keep, got, keep, dip down, to come up down To that dance, they call the Heepy-Jeepiest Dance

Sweet Mama, Papa got to do a heavey. So that was Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five recorded in 1926, Heebie-Jeebies, which is considered the first recorded scatting. It's interesting when he played in New Orleans with King Oliver and when he played in New York with Fletcher Henderson before starting his own bands. Nobody wanted him to sing. And he became so famous and so loved for his singing. Why didn't they want him to sing? Well, to Armstrong, he said that the concept of a trumpet player or any instrumentalist also singing was just, it was a foreign concept at that time. People just didn't do it. But you were one or the other?

Either one or the other, exactly. But there was also something about Armstrong, where I just think his natural personality, his showmanship, his mugging, his way of putting over a song, especially when he got to New York. I think the Henderson and the men in his band, which kind of fancy themselves as, you know, Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, they kind of look down at that kind of Southern fried performing style. And so Armstrong, he, for the rest of his life, he always said Henderson had a million dollar talent in his

band, but he missed the boat. And I even called one of the chapters in the book, Blessed Assurance, because I think before anybody else, Armstrong was confident in his abilities as a vocalist. He knew it was different, and he knew if he only got the chance, you know, people would respond. And here we are, you know, in 2025. What a wonderful world. Just went, you know, certified double platinum in 2024 of a record where he doesn't even play a note of trumpet. So once again, you know, Armstrong kind of has the last laugh. He just needed that opportunity to let

people hear that distinctive voice of his. And he was singing before he was playing trumpet. Another point that he always wanted to stress, you know, because people would say, oh, you know, the trumpet player, that's the genius. You have the guy singing and that's kind of, he's just doing that, you know, just to commercialize himself and you know, put these songs over. But no, I have a quote from R. Valshaw. I said that if Armstrong never picked up a trumpet, he would have been a singer.

Singing was in his blood more than the trumpet. And it was his real first musical foray in New Orleans before he ever picked up a cornet. We're listening to Terry's interview with Ricky Riccardi, author of the new book Stomp Off, Let's Go, the early years of Louis Armstrong. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

Hey, it's a Martinez. I work on a news show. And yeah, the news can feel like a lot on any given day, but you just can't ignore las noticias when important world changing events are happening. That is where the up first podcast comes in. Every single morning Whatever your job is, wherever you're from, NPR is a resource for all Americans. Our mission is to create a more informed public. We do that by providing free access to independent, rigorous journalism that's accountable to the public. You, federal funding for public media, provides critical support of this work. Learn more about how to safeguard it at ProtectMyPublicMedia.org. You know, it's really remarkable and lucky for us that Armstrong was able to reach such

iconic status and have such a long and productive career considering the circumstances he grew up in. Describe for us the neighborhood he grew up in in New Orleans and just remind us too of the year he was born. So Armstrong was born in 1901. I won't get into the whole birthday debate. Yeah, we can skip that part. I believe he was born July 4th, 1901, but for reasons that are explained in the book.

But either way, he was born 1901, spends his first few years living with his grandmother, but then around the age of five, he moves to the third ward, Liberty and Perdido streets. He moves into a tiny flat with his mother and sister. And this neighborhood was so dangerous, it was known as the battlefield. And Armstrong, he spent most of his adult years telling these stories with a little bit of a wink and a smile. And he would talk about Black Benny, you know, the drummer who would fight during the parades. And he would say, Oh, well, my mother, whether or not she was a prostitute, I cannot say, but, you know, she worked hard

and taught us the rudiments. And so for this book, you know, I wanted to keep Armstrong's words in place, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and talk about some of these characters. And the deeper I went into police records and newspaper reports, all I can say is it's a miracle he emerged alive, because from the time he's five, six, seven years old, he is seeing, you know, gunfights and stabbings and there's gamblers and pimps and prostitutes and his mother is arrested almost every year

and sent to the house of detention. Sometimes three, four weeks, Armstrong would have to watch over his baby sister cooking for her and for him and doing whatever he could to make ends meet. He's working, he's selling newspapers, he's working for the Jewish Karnofsky family. He's doing whatever he can to survive, but the police are there. He mentioned the only time he was ever scared in his childhood were the police, because they would whip his head and then ask his name later.

Gets arrested multiple times, the first time at the age of nine for being a dangerous and suspicious character. And even in his teenage years, when he finally starts taking music seriously and getting more and more gigs, he said it was a miracle he didn't die at these honky tonks. Cause you know, every night there'd be a gunfight, bullets going right past him.

And he said that the bouncer, whose name was Oscar Slippers Johnson, he would protect Armstrong, make sure he didn't get hit. And that's why I think when you read Armstrong's second autobiography, Satchmo, My Life in New Orleans, it ends with him leaving New Orleans and joining King Oliver. Because I think in his mind, that was the climax. Everything that followed was gravy because he had survived this childhood that, if it was a Hollywood film, somebody would say, well, this is cliche.

This is rags to riches. You know, nobody could have actually experienced this. But in his case, it's all true. and I found all the facts to back him up. Well, in doing your research, you think that his mother was a sex worker and that his sister became a sex worker while his mother was in jail, and she needed to earn some money. And as a kid, that Armstrong helped out, worked for sex workers. And as a young man, he tried being a pimp.

He did. And that was one line in his New York Times obituary that I'm sure had a lot of Hello Dolly fans kind of scratching their head. But it's true. And he told that story too. He was stabbed in the shoulder by the prostitute that he tried serving as the pimp for. And he showed off that scar for the rest of his life. So I also take time in the shoulder by the prostitute that he tried serving as the pimp for, and he showed off that scar for the rest of his life. So I also take time in the book to talk about the other figures from the wife's home, the orphanage where he spent a couple of years and some of these. Well, let's stop at that for a second because he spent a couple of years there after being arrested for possession of a gun.

He was still a minor and for shooting it in the air. You think it was his mother's gun? – It was, according to his sister. She said definitively it was their mother's gun. – So he was sent to the Colored Waif's home for boys for what, a couple of years? – He was there a year and a half. – And that's where he really got his start as an instrumentalist. I mean, you hate to say something like, you know, that's the best thing that ever happened to him.

But honestly, it was the first time that he had structure in his life. You know, the Waifs home gave him three meals a day and schooling and taught him trades. But more importantly, they had a music program. It was run by a man named Peter Davis. And at first, Davis did not give Armstrong the time of day because he knew kids from Armstrong's neighborhood were nothing but trouble. But he saw that Lewis was always hanging around the band room and eventually started him on the tambourine and the drum and the horn, the bugle, and finally the cornet.

And so on New Year's Eve when Armstrong was arrested, the newspapers, you know, they referred to him as Lewis Armstrong, comma, old offender, that was his reputation at the age of 12. But then on Decoration Day, the Waves Home band did a parade through Armstrong's neighborhood, and the newspapers covered that and all of a sudden it was Louis Armstrong, leader. So the Waves Home made him into a musician. It really showed him, this is your way out if you take this seriously. And he did. And even though they had this incredible music program, I followed the stories

of some of the other kids there and who ended up, you know, shot in the head at the age of 17, who ended up in Sing Sing, who ended up, you know, a well-known pickpocket. And so he could have made any wrong choice at any time and have been one of those kids. He could have been gunned down, he could have been arrested, he could have, you know, the whole sound of the 20th century could have changed, and we're just lucky that he had some angel on his shoulder or something that kind of helped him through

and were all the beneficiaries. Well, let's hear another recording by Armstrong. I'm gonna play Cornette Chapssui. You say about that, that it had the effect on instrumentalists that heebie-jeebies had on singers. So what is the importance of this song in terms of American music and in terms of Armstrong's career? Well, the amazing thing for me is Cornette Chapssui was

the next song recorded after heebie-jeebies. So I always like to make the point that you you know, you can name a million great vocalists and a million great instrumentalists and Armstrong is the only person who totally changed the way people sang and he totally changed the way people soloed and played music on their instruments and he really does it on one day, February 26, 1926. But Cornet Chopsui was kind of his coming out party to show all the tools in his toolbox of what he could do with his cornet. And so it opens with his dazzling unaccompanied introduction, you know, just letting everybody know, I'm here, I'm the leader. And then the melody,

I was just talking to the great multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson, we were saying, you can play that melody tonight in the 21st century, and it sounds fresh, it sounds modern. And so that was a melody that he had written two years earlier, but the main part was this stop time solo. And I think trumpet players and trombonists and guitarists and piano players, they all heard that and they said, wow, that's how you tell a story. You know, that's how you really solo and it's not just arpeggios, it's not just, you know, just playing quick or whatever, it's technical stuff. It's actually got a beginning, middle, and an end.

And so, Cornet Chop Suey was analyzed as this masterpiece of improvisation until the 1990s when it was discovered that Armstrong had copyrighted the song two years earlier and he had written down the whole solo, note for note. And then in the 1950s when that record was played for some of his old New Orleans contemporaries, they all said, oh my goodness, that's Buddy Petit. And Buddy Petit was a cornet player that Armstrong heard and admired when he was a kid, but Buddy Petit never recorded.

He died in 1931, left behind no record. And so to me, cornet chop suey is on surface level. You'll hear it, you know, it's still, it sounds modern and fresh and we can still learn a lot from it. But to me, it's also Armstrong's series about his craft, writing down the melody, writing down the solo, showing off the influence of a musician who never got to record and, you know, simultaneously forecasting the shape of jazz to come, but also really leaning into

his New Orleans roots. So we're going to feature the stop time part in this recording. So you described the stop time part as thrilling, but I want you to describe what stop time is for people who don't know. Sure. So stop time, usually you get the rhythm section is hitting the beats on every beat, every quarter note. Yeah, bum, bum, bum, bum.

Well, stop time, they all just focus on the first beat. So it's like one, two, three, four, they hit one note, one accent, and that just lets Lewis, he's out there, you know, without a parachute. He just has to play without that chugging, swinging rhythm section behind him. They're just accenting the first beat of every measure. And it's hard to do that because, you know, you could lose your time, you could lose your equilibrium, you know, the band, they also have to do that because you could lose your time, you could lose your equilibrium, the band. They also have to hit that first beat altogether on the nose. And it's become a kind of a lost art form in certain circles,

but few did it better than the Hot Five. So let's listen to Louis Armstrong's 1926 Hot Five recording of Cornet Chapssui. And what we're going to do is we're going to crossfade and skip apart because I want to hit all the high points that Ricky Riccardi just mentioned. the the the the the the the

the the Oh, That was Cornette Chop Suey, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, recorded in 1926. Ricky Riccardi, it's just been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure, Terry. This has been an honor and, you know, I always have to leave my closing phrase, Pops is Tops. Ricky Riccardi's new book is Stomp Off, Let's Go! The Early Years of Louis Armstrong. He spoke with Terry Gross. In the new film, I'm Still Here, the Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles tells the true story of a Rio de Janeiro mother who reinvents herself when Brazil's military dictatorship goes after her husband.

The movie has been Oscar nominated for both Best Picture and Best International Feature Film. Its star, Fernanda Torres, has been nominated for Best Actress. She's already won the Golden Globe, and our critic-at-large John Powers says, I'm Still Here is a moving, inspiring, beautifully made story about learning to confront tyranny. It's one measure of Latin America's arduous history that it spawns so many books and movies about dictatorship. Over the years I've been through scads of them, from novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

and Mario Vargas Llosa, to the landmark documentaries of Patricio Guzman, to Hollywood thrillers like Missing and Under Fire. What they share is the awareness that history hurts. Few films have shown this with more delicate intelligence than I'm Still Here, a moving new drama set during Brazil's military dictatorship that began with an American-backed coup in 1964 and ended in 1985. Based on a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Walter Sallaz's movie is no political tract or manipulative tear-joker, although it may make you cry.

Exploring the dictatorship indirectly, I'm Still Here tells the heroic true story of a wife and mother who steers her family through the rapids of tyranny. The story begins idyllically on Ipanema Beach in 1970, when we first meet the Pi of a Family. The father is Rubens, played with easy charm by Sultan Mello, a warm-hearted man who was a congressman before the coup. And by Eunice, that's Fernanda Torres, a rather traditional-seeming wife who bakes great soufflés and wrangles their five high-energy children. Theirs is a happy upper-middle-class family whose home is a kind of Eden, complete with a view of the beach.

Buzzing with openness to friends, to ideas, to laughter, to music—the movie's soundtrack is fabulous—their house is Brazil as we might dream of it being. Yet such openness is precisely what the junta mistrusts. It tortures or disappears anyone it considers a threat to its notion of an orderly, anti-communist society. Even as the family dances, plays foosball, and amulet bickers, we await the dreaded knock on the door. It comes.

Rubens is taken away for questioning, security men occupy the house, and Eunice herself is called in for a nasty interrogation. Rubens' disappearance is the turning point in Eunice's life. Over the next months, in fact the next decades, she transforms her practical maternal virtues into something mighty. Channeling her grief, she becomes a stronger, tougher, wiser person who protects her kids, digs into the cruel facts of her husband's fate, and learns to fight for other people's rights as well. From the start, Eunice is a woman of impressive self-command, and the movie shares that virtue.

Salas has always been a gifted director, but earlier films like Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries were so busy being artful and important, they often felt impersonal. Here you feel his profound emotional engagement. Salas grew up in the same milieu as the Pivas. Indeed, he hung out with the kids. found emotional engagement. Salas grew up in the same milieu as the Pivas. Indeed he hung out with the kids, and you feel his affection for that family and its values. He captures them, and 1970 Rio, in a way that feels loving and true.

Salas does a superb job of depicting how the dictatorship colored daily life. We see how things could often appear normal, with fun at the beach and happy visits to the ice cream shop. Yet without laying on the violence or heavy-handed moralism—even the secret policemen we meet aren't monsters—Salas also conjures a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety. We feel it in the sounds of helicopters hovering overhead, the TV newscasts filled with lies, the spasms of fearful mistrust that grow between friends, and the way that once your family is singled out,

you're treated differently out in the world. Like Brazil, their House of Freedom is now in lockdown. The counterweight to the dictatorship is the unglamorous strength of Unisi, who goes from making soufflés to becoming at forty-eight a lawyer who helps make Brazil a better place to live. She's played with surpassing brilliance by Torres, whose performance is so subtle, so internal, and so quietly shattering that in a just world she'd win all this year's

big acting awards. Registering each flicker of emotion as precisely as a seismograph, Torres captures Eunice's pain and horror at her husband's fate, but also her endurance, her faith that life goes on. A faith that time vindicates. Even as it's buffeted by misfortune, the family survives and thrives. At one point, a newspaper photographer comes to take a picture of the family and tells them to look somber. After all, Rubens is missing.

But Eunice insists that everyone smile. She will not let them face the world looking beaten. John Powers reviewed the new movie, I'm Still Here. Coming up, we'll talk about the loneliness epidemic with writer Derek Thompson, author of a recent article in the Atlantic called The Anti-Social Century. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. There's been a lot of attention on loneliness lately.

16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time. The former Surgeon General even declared a loneliness epidemic. On It's Been A Minute, we're launching a new series called All the Lonely People, diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it. That's on the It's Been A Minute podcast on NPR. If you're a super fan of fresh air with Terri Gross, we have exciting news. WHYY has launched a Fresh Air Society, a leadership group dedicated to ensuring Fresh Air's legacy. For over 50 years, this program has brought you fascinating interviews with favorite authors, artists,

actors, and more. As a member of the Fresh Air Society, you'll receive special benefits and recognition. Learn more at whyy.org slash Fresh Air Society. Recently my guest, writer Derek Thompson, took his family out to dinner and noticed that while the restaurant was bustling, he and his family were the only people actually sitting down to eat. Every few minutes, a flurry of people would walk in, grab bags of food and walk out. The restaurant's bar counter had become, as he puts it, a silent depot for people to grab food to eat at home in solitude. In February's issue of the Atlantic, Thompson writes about the phenomenon he calls the anti-social century.

More people are choosing isolation over hanging out with others, and we can't blame it all on COVID-19. This trend started before the pandemic. The problem is that humans by nature are social beings, and the consequences of isolation are stark. Our personalities are changing, as well as our politics and our relationship to reality. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said, we're in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Derek Thompson is a writer for The Atlantic and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter. He's also the author of the books Hitmakers and On Work, Money, Meaning, Identity, and

the host of the podcast Plain English. His new book, Abundance, co-authored with Ezra Klein, comes out in March. Derek Thompson, welcome to Fresh Air. And I'm excited to talk with you again. Derek Thompson It's really wonderful to be here. And I'm excited to talk to you as well. Teresa Kuhn Okay, Derek, I think a lot of us would assume that what you saw when you were out to dinner with your family is just a holdover of the pandemic, but you actually traced this isolation even further back. What did you find?

This is a story that seems to go back at least 60 years. There was a very famous book written in 2000 called Bowling Alone by the sociologist Robert Putnam. And Putnam traced the entire 20th century and showed that in the first half of the 20th century, people were significantly more social, more likely to join unions and clubs and associations, more likely to get married, more likely to have children. Just about every measure of sociality was rising as if on a single wave for the first 50 or

60 years of the 1900s. And then in the second half of the 20th century, something changed. And people became less likely to marry, less likely to have children, less likely to join associations, less likely to spend time with people, really less likely to do just about everything. And the book is really extraordinary in that it traces everything from, you know,

big social phenomena like marriage to tiny social phenomena like how many thank you cards or greeting cards you fill out every year and finds that just as all manner of socializing was on a surging wave in the first half of the 20th century, that wave crashed and declined in the second half. A lot of people are familiar with Robert Putnam and his thesis of bowling alone, but what really startled me is that there was a tremendous acceleration of alone time in the 21st century.

Okay, Derek, when I hear you say this goes back 60 years, I'm just thinking the consequences then must be more profound than we realize. And technology is at the heart of it. Absolutely. Technology is at the heart of it. There's many things we can point to that change the 1960s and 1970s. But I'm very persuaded that if you want to understand the marrow of this issue, you should be looking at the most important technologies of the 20th century, which are the car and the television.

And the automobile, I would say, privatized people's lives. It allowed us to move into the suburbs, to move away from density, which is to say other people, spend more time alone in our backyards and alone in our houses. But then along in the 1950s, 1960s came another technology that really fit right with the automobile, and that's the television. And if the car privatized our lives, I think the television privatized our leisure. And when you dig into the numbers, it is extraordinary just how much TV changed what it meant to be alive

in the last 50 years of the 1900s. There's federal data suggesting that between 1960 and the 1990s, the average American added about six hours of leisure time to every week. That's an extra 300 hours of leisure time every year. And think about, like, if you were waking up on January 1st and someone said, how do you want to spend an extra 300 hours of leisure that I'm giving you this year? Do you want to learn how to play an instrument or learn a new language or read all the books you wanted to read?

We didn't do any of that. We basically spent all that time watching more television. So coming up to the age of the smartphone, even before you get to that infamous device, you had, I think, the automobile and the television set sort of setting the ground for what has been an enormous decline in face-to-face socializing. Your article makes a distinction between solitude and loneliness. And this was probably, for me, the most profound part of your piece because we actually are

under this assumption that all of this me time, I think a lot of us, I should say, not everyone, but that this me time, I think a lot of us, I should say, not everyone, but that this me time is good for us. It's like a form of self-care because it's like as if the world is so overstimulating that we need all of this time alone. To me, this is the most important conceptual scoop of the essay. As you mentioned in your open, everyone wants to talk about loneliness these days. You know, Vivek Murthy says that loneliness is an epidemic. You have ministers of loneliness being granted new positions

in places like the UK and Japan. Everyone wants to talk about loneliness. But among the many people that I spoke to for this article, I talked to the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who passed along a relatively familiar within sociology definition of loneliness. Loneliness, he said, is the gap between felt social connection and desired social connection. Loneliness is a healthy thing to feel in the right doses. It's what gets us off the couch to spend time with people. But in fact, I think a lot of Americans don't feel lonely as we typically define that feeling. Rather than spend time alone and think to

themselves, I should be around more people. I think many Americans in the last 20 years particularly are spending more time alone by choice year after year after year. So the reason why I think this is really important to point out is that there's a lot of very very smart people who have read this article and read previous articles about loneliness who look at the hard data and they say you actually can't show with a lot of survey data that loneliness is rising. Actually loneliness seems to be very stable. My point is they might be right.

And maybe the social crisis that we have today is rising solitude without rising loneliness. That sociologist that you talked to that told you like loneliness is a healthy response and that it is the thing that pushes us off the couch, out into the world. That kind of makes it sound like our phones might actually be blocking us from feeling that natural instinct. But yet people feel like they're being very social by being on their phones and being on social media sites and stuff. They might feel that way, but it is not a coincidence, I think, that if you ask generation after generation how many friends do you have, it turns out to be the most phone-bound generations, young people, who have the fewest friends.

If you ask people over the last 30, 40 years, how many times do you spend hanging out with your friends? That number has declined by 50% for high schoolers. If you ask high schoolers going back over the last 20 years, how anxious do you feel? How consistently depressed or anxious or sad do you feel? Those numbers are near all-time highs. So it's very, very hard to say for sure what people feel when they look into their phones. And I should absolutely grant the premise that a lot of time that people spend on their phones is social after a fashion. You have to put all of this together, that the same generation that's spending a historic amount of time on their phone has fewer friends, spends less time with their friends,

feels more depressed, feels more anxious. That tells me that the phone time we have that seems to be a substitute for face-to-face socializing is a poor, poor substitute. Okay, Derek, let's talk a little bit about political polarization. I love the subtitle of this section of your piece. It's called, This is Your Politics on Solitude.

How has all of this isolation, how has it changed our politics? One of the most interesting conversations I had in the reporting process for this piece was a conversation with Mark Dunkelman, who's a researcher and author at Brown University. And Mark told me that ironically and surprisingly, this age of the digitization of everything has actually made some relationships much closer. You know, it's possible to text your partner throughout the day, hundreds of times, and stay connected to them, and you know, any best friends that you have, stay connected to them and you know any best friends that you have, stay connected to them in ways that were totally impossible. And so you can think of this as being the inner ring of intimacy has grown stronger or

it's potentially grown stronger for some people in this age of the smartphone. At the same time the fact that we have access to social media and group texts plugs us into networks of shared affinities that we could also never really experience 20 or 30 years ago. So for example, Mark's case was he's a big Cincinnati Bengals fan living in Providence, Rhode Island, and he said, you know, look, there's like 17 other Cincinnati Bengals fans in the, you know, the entire state of Rhode Island. There's no one around me who shares my interest in the NFL,

but because of the internet, I can talk to this global tribe of Bengals fans and we can stay connected with each other. And he made this really profound point that while the inner ring of intimacy is strengthening and the outer ring of tribe is also strengthening, there's a middle ring of what he calls the village that is atrophying.

And the village are is atrophying. The village are our neighbors, the people who live around us. You actually say that this kind of helps explain progressive, stubborn inability to understand President Donald Trump's appeal. Say more about it. So I think that we are socially isolating ourselves from our neighbors, especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of especially when our neighbors disagree with us. We're not used to talking to people outside of our family

that we disagree with. And this has consequences on both sides. For the Republican side, I think it's led to the popularization of candidates like Donald Trump, who essentially are a kind of all-tribe, no-village avatar. He thrives in out-group animosity. He thrives in outgroup animosity. He thrives in alienating the outsider and making it seem like politics and America itself, just a constant us versus them struggle.

So I think that the antisocial century has clearly fed the Trump phenomenon. If you don't understand a movement that has received 200 million votes in the last nine years. Perhaps it's you who've made yourself a stranger in your own land by not talking to one of the tens of millions of profound Donald Trump supporters who live in America and more to the point live in your neighborhood to understand where their values come from. You don't have to agree with their politics. In fact, I would expect you to violently disagree with their politics. But getting along with and understanding people with whom we disagree is what a strong village is all about. Understanding someone who doesn't

share your politics but also sends their daughter to the same dance class, has an issue with the same math teacher that you have same dance class, has an issue with the same math teacher that you have an issue with, has a problem with the same falling down bridge in your community that you have a problem with. Finding ways to see people who disagree with us as full-blooded people who share some of our underlying values is a part of what living in a community is all about. And I do think that just as the antisocial century has turned parts of the right into this angry,

all-tribe, no-village style of politics, it is also partly responsible for why so many progressives claim to not understand the most successful political movement of their time. You know what's so interesting about what you're saying too is that I feel like we were having this conversation in 2016 when there was this indictment on elite and mainstream media that like somehow the mainstream media missed this Trump wave. And from 2016 to now 2025, I mean, we're still here with this baffled, like, people are baffled by the phenomenon that you're talking about. How much of a role does media play in this issue as well?

I think it plays an enormous role. And, you know, I could spend all sorts of time criticizing, you know, institutional media. But the truth is, I think this is a demand problem, which is to say it's an audience problem, um, fundamentally. I think that most people want news that makes them feel a sense of fluency. Fluency is this term from psychology that has a very specific meaning. It's not like being able to, you know to speak Spanish very well or English very well. Fluency refers to a style of metacognition, a feeling that we have about thinking. I have a personal theory, that might be wrong, but it's just my theory,

that what most people want from news is fluency. What they want from their news is a feeling that is adjacent to entertainment, that the thoughts that they have when they're consuming that news make them feel good. Maybe it makes them feel a good kind of curiosity, maybe it makes them feel a good kind of self-righteousness, maybe it makes them feel a good kind of anger or outrage. But what they want is that sense of fluency, and that sense of fluency tends to come from media that we agree with. It doesn't make us feel this disfluent sense of someone who I trust to be on my side

is now saying something that's not on my side. I don't like that feeling. And then I also think that the news itself, you know, we can't let ourselves off the hook. If the people who are reading the New York Times or reading the Atlantic or listening to NPR feel like they don't understand, you know, the most important political movement of this time, which clearly is the Donald Trump movement.

He's the president, it's Republicans who control the Senate. Well, clearly, you know, we have failed, the media, institutional media, we have failed to teach or reflect some kind of truth about our nation to the people who rely on us to understand the truth of our nation to the people who rely on us to understand the truth of our nation. And I suppose to connect all of this back to the antisocial century, we all need to get out a little bit more. And if we want to be appropriate and wise consumers of news, we want to be wise consumers

of news that make us sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable about the future. Okay, Derek, short of some sort of apocalyptic ending of the internet that would force us to look up from our phones and at each other, what can we do to combat this? The answer is very straightforward. You leave your house, you hang out with people, you invite more people or you invite more people to your house in order to have dinner parties Which have also declined tremendously in the last 20 years This is an easy problem to solve on the surface. The problem is What about the collective action issue? It is easier to hang out with your friends in the physical world if your friends are already Likely to or have demonstrated a willingness to hang out in the physical world likely to or have demonstrated a willingness to hang out in the physical world. It's easier to throw a dinner party if the couple guests that you're inviting over

already go to dinner parties, have already demonstrated that they want to go out on Friday night, go over to people's houses on Friday night in order to have wine and chicken and steak or whatever. So I do recognize there's a collective action problem here to solve. But I also think it's really important not to over complicate this by suggesting that requires some enormous cultural shifts. I think that our little decisions, the little minute to minute decisions that we make about spending time with other people, these decisions can scale. They create patterns of behavior and patterns of behavior create cultural norms.

And those cultural norms can scale as well, and they can create ages. And right now, I think we're in an age of anti-socializing. We're in an age of withdrawal. We're in an age of, it's totally fine to be at a party and look down at your phone for 30 minutes. I think that a different kind of future is possible, and that future rests on, is built on, these tiny little decisions. Should I text a friend when I have a little bit of time, or should I go on Facebook? Should I hang out with my friend, or should I just text them? Should I, you know, make some date for a bunch of people who are on a group text and live in the

same town, but like never get together to actually see each other. And so we're constantly in a state of catching up but never in a state of hanging out. These are all things that everyone listening knows how to do. My wish is that a few actions here and there could actually trigger a behavioral cascade. Derek Thompson, I always really enjoy talking to you. Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure. Thank you. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His recent cover story is called The Anti-Social Century. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.