Offline with Jon Favreau - John Green Doesn’t Think the World is Ending (Yet)

Episode Date: April 16, 2023

John Green, bestselling author and YouTube Vlogbrother, joins Offline to share lessons from his most recent book, The Anthropocene Reviewed. His collection of essays rates historical events, philosophical musings and personal anecdotes on a 5-star scale that, these days, feels both inescapable and indispensable. The Jo(h)ns talk through the faults in these stars, and the importance of finding ways to live meaningfully and hopefully in a world of mixed reviews. 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.

For me, like finding a path to hopefulness is not like a intellectual exercise. It's like a necessity for survival. And so I get there by fighting my way back there each time. And by believing, you know, I mean, it's easy to forget this, but like, humans are amazing. Think of the music that we've made. Think of the ways that we've protected each other. Think of the kindness that we're able to show those we love, the ways we sacrifice for each other, the ways that we collaborate across time and space. There's so much about us that's so beautiful. And so I do, I try to go back and remind myself that even when my brain tells me that there is no hope, that nobody cares about me, that there is no love in my life, that I'm merely a burden on those who I care about, et cetera, all the dirty lies that the brain will tell you, I try to remind myself that's not the whole story, because a simple story is never the whole story. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is author and YouTuber Jon Green.

Jon Green is a lot of things. He's a New York Times bestselling author, including the 2014 sensation The Fault in Our Stars. He's the host of Crash Course, a YouTube series ubiquitous in high school classrooms across the country. And he's the brother of previous offline guest Hank Green, who John started his first YouTube series, Vlog Brothers, with nearly 16 years ago. To me, John is a kindred spirit, someone who's also become worried about our intensely online existence, which we've both done our best to make sense of. Me with this podcast, and John in The Anthropocene Reviewed, an essay collection from 2021 that represents his first foray into nonfiction. The Anthropocene Reviewed is one of the most creative, insightful books I've ever read. It's a series of essays where John reviews everyday aspects of human life on a five-star scale. Everything from Diet Dr. Pepper to CNN to the Human Capacity for Wonder. He even rates the internet itself. Three stars, which I thought was a little generous.

But each review illuminates a larger insight about humanity to which John brings his earnest, empathetic perspective. 15 pages in, I knew I had to invite John on the show. We ended up having a fascinating conversation about the book, being a public figure online, and about all the things that make John anxious in this moment. Definitely one of my favorite offline interviews. Of course, there's so much in the book

that we couldn't touch on in just 45 minutes, so I highly recommend reading it. As always, if you have any comments, questions, or guest ideas, please email us at offlineatcricket.com. And please stick around after my interview with John Green. I had a quick conversation with Max Fisher where we try to answer the age-old question, is Twitter finally in a death spiral? All right, here's John Green. John Green, welcome to Offline. Oh, I'm so happy to be here. I had a wonderful conversation with your brother Hank about a year ago now, so I'm excited to complete the Green Brothers circuit here on Offline.

Yeah, no, the only reason I'm doing this is because he said it was a good time. Okay, good, good, good. Well, that's good to know. I've been especially looking forward to this conversation because as someone who's always struggled with anxiety and has been recently consumed with existential angst, I sensed a kindred spirit in you. Yeah, yeah, no, I have a lot of anxiety. And I have recently also been consumed by existential angst. I'm not exactly sure what's causing yours. But then again, I'm also not exactly sure what's causing mine.

I kind of feel like it's going around these days. It does feel that way. Well, one of the reasons I started this show is the same reason you wrote your last book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, which is that my attention had become fractured. What was that realization like for you? Well, I had just begun to feel that the way that I was consuming the social internet had very little to do with choice, very little to do with what I wanted. I'd benefited so long from the internet that I was, I think, a little reluctant to acknowledge that I was no longer really benefiting from it. And so I wanted to take some time to try to think deeply, not just

about the world around me, but also about thought itself and what I was thinking about. And this old question of free will that's been at the center of a lot of my work was coming back up as well, because am I really a product of my own thoughts or am I a product of this information environment that I've kind of allowed myself to live in, even though I recognize that there's some big problems with it? You have this great piece of advice from a friend and mentor of yours who passed away. Pay attention to what you pay attention to. Yeah. What were you paying attention to when you first started taking that advice?

Well, when I first started doing this work with The Anthropocene Reviewed, the first idea, and this really did come from Amy Krauss Rosenthal, that writer who told me to pay attention to what I pay attention to. My first idea was like, well, there's two things that I think about almost every day that I've never seen anybody write about in depth, which are Diet Dr. Pepper and Canada geese. I have a lot of Canada geese that live right outside my house year round. They're not migrators. And we have, I think it's safe to say, like not the best relationship. So I started writing about Diet Dr. Pepper and Canada geese, both of which turn out to have a much more fascinating history than I ever could have imagined.

The book's conceit is so smart and creative. And for those who don't know, it's a series of short essays where you review different aspects of human life, like Canada geese or Diet Dr. Pepper, and you do it on a five-star scale. I know it started as a podcast, too. How did structuring the book as a series of five-star reviews help you communicate what you wanted to about humanity? Well, I also wanted to make fun of the five-star scale and I wanted to acknowledge all these places where there are little things that have very, very recently begun to occupy big parts of our shared consciousness that haven't really been examined that much from the rise of smartphones to the rise of the five-star scale. And there is something a little ludicrous about trying to assign a single data point to something as complex as Dr. Pepper or a podcast or a book or humanity's capacity for wonder, which is another one of the chapters in

the book. But I liked that approach too, because it sort of acknowledges the ridiculousness of contemporary experience while also I did really want to understand what do I love and not love about being here? How can I fall in love with the world without denying or minimizing the reality of suffering and the extent to which that suffering is unjustly distributed because of human-built systems? How can I reckon with that reality and emerge from the reckoning hopeful? Unsurprisingly, your review of the internet caught my eye. You gave it three stars. I'm currently hovering around like two, two and a half. Though I do share the same 90s era nostalgia as you. That was nice to read that because I have some good memories

of the internet from way back. But you were just talking about what it's done to your attention. You also said that after 30 years or so of being on the internet, it's had a lot of, you've been noticing the negative effects. What have some of those negative effects been

in addition to sort of the fractured attention? I don't think we understand many to many communication very well yet. I don't think it's existed for very long. I see these conversations on Twitter, not just about politics and the big things, but about little things like the fourth tier English soccer team I'm a fan of. And I see them just devolve into toxicity so fast. And I don't think it's because the people who are having those conversations are evil. I think it's because of the structures and the architecture of the system itself and the ways those architectures are changing. And so I think these problems probably always existed to an extent. They probably always existed on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and the other places where

I feel them most intensely. But I think that recognizing the power of these systems has also brought in a lot of bad actors. And I don't just mean in terms of the user base. I also mean in terms of the people who are shaping the architecture of the systems themselves, that they've sensed that this is a path to power. And so I think that's part of why we're in this mess. But yeah, I mean, I feel it intensely every day because every day I let algorithms decide how I'm feeling about the world that day, which is troubling. I mean, for me, I think the internet is largely, if not chiefly, to blame for the fact that I can barely read anymore,

forget about writing, used to do that in another life, don't do that anymore. How do you find time to write and think when your job also requires you to be on the internet so much? Well, I do think I struggle with it as well. Before I started making YouTube videos, I wrote like three novels in three years. And since then, I've written like three novels in 16 years. So I don't know that it's been great for my writing. But what I love about writing is very different from what I love about the internet. The internet is everything. It's a fire

hose. It's intense. The responses can come within seconds or they can come years later and you never know who's going to respond or when. And that's part of the thrill of it. It's like being at a slot machine where you can't win money, but you can win thrilling internet points. And writing and reading for me are the opposite of that. They're quiet, they're contemplative, they require sustained attention. And if I don't have that in my life, I get really sad and anxious. For me, writing is almost like a long walk in the woods or something. I have to do it to feel fully alive. I have to do it. And then I also have to do it to kind of reintegrate myself into myself,

if that makes sense. On some level, I don't think I know what I'm thinking until I write about it. I mean, therapists give this advice a lot, which is that like, you should wake up and write or spend some time writing because that's the one way to sort of integrate the both sides of your brain. And, and like, I've heard this advice and I still get up at five in the morning and go downstairs and sit in my office and I'm like, all right, should I write for five minutes or should I just check the news? And then I check the news and I'm like fuck it's so hard it's so hard because I agree you know like I know the last date I didn't check the news first thing in the morning because it was September 11th 2001 and every day since then uh when I wake up the first thing I do is check the

news and like I'm not gonna make that mistake again yeah and and also just there's a sense of like well what happened overnight that might shape my experience today? And I really want to know that now. And I can know that now. And I struggle with it too. Like, I'm not trying to sound all high and mighty or anything. It's just that, yeah, I mean, I struggle with it so much that like right before this conversation, I was on the internet, like trying to figure out who's winning a war, which the internet is not going to be able to tell me today. It's just so compelling. It's so good at doing what it was designed to do, which was to grab and hold our attention. That's what the internet is optimized for in 2023. The internet is optimized for holding your attention at all costs because your attention is valuable. It's the product that they're selling. And ultimately, like I think a lot of the individuals who work in these companies, they want to do good. But like ultimately, you've got to maximize the amount of attention you capture. And the way that that happens is by making people scared, making them feel really intensely, making them angry, making them outraged, and making them believe that the people who disagree with them are not just idiots, but dangerous idiots. Do you feel that our extremely online existence has changed at all

the way you write or think or converse even? that i i can't like i'm not sure about this yet but i feel like i've noticed in the last several years that even like thought patterns become like quicker yeah and and more like in line with how you read the news on twitter and how the information comes at you out of your phone and i'm just wondering that even even sometimes when i like put the phone down and go take a walk, it's like, it's hard to get into deeper thinking. Yeah, I mean, let me give you a non-internet answer to that question.

For the first like six years after I graduated from college, like I briefly worked as a hospital chaplain and then I went to work for this magazine called Booklist. And at Booklist, the reviews have to be 175 words long. And I wrote many hundreds of reviews in the six years that I worked there. And even to this day, I'll look at one of my novels, and I'll highlight a paragraph, and it will often be 175 words. That's not because I did that on purpose. It's just because that's how long I think paragraphs are, because that's how I was trained as a writer. And I think it would be very

bold of us to assume that both our individual consciousnesses and then our shared experience of the world is not being shaped by this thing that we do all the time. Yeah. You get a larger problem with the way we consume information. In your excellent review of CNN, two stars, maybe a touch generous, but yeah. I got actually, I actually interviewed, I had an interview on CNN where somebody was like, it's not very nice, you know? And I was like, well, I mean, I think that there's other news channels that are one star. That makes you feel any better.

Yeah, it's like all the cable channels. None of them are, yeah, too good. You point out what's considered news isn't primarily what's noteworthy or important, but what's new. So we get a lot of garbage. We lose a lot of context. We end up misinformed about the world. I think obviously with the internet and social media, this dynamic seems to be getting worse, not better, obviously. How central of a problem do you think this is for humanity? I think it's pretty big, but I'm also biased as a media and political person. So maybe I'm in a bubble.

Yeah, I mean, I'm also in a bubble, just a slightly different bubble. But I think most of us know that the deadliest infectious disease in 2021 and 2022 was COVID. And I think almost none of us in the rich world know that the second deadliest infectious disease in 2021 and 2022 was tuberculosis, which has been the deadliest infectious disease every year until 2020, since 1970, and then before the antibiotic era for probably 50,000 consecutive years. And so when I think about the way that we're distributing information, gosh, we can talk a lot about the issues that are super polarizing and that mostly affect people in the rich world. And some of that makes sense, right? Like you and I both live in the United States. The politics and policy of the United States has big influence on us and on our communities

and indeed on the world. But to only focus on that sort of basket of issues and to completely lose the historical context or the larger global context that for most people in the world over the last two decades, the biggest infectious disease threat has been tuberculosis. That is a problem, I think. I worry that it ends up lifting up the kinds of voices that can easily access Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, in English, mostly. And it ends up further oppressing, further pushing out, further pushing away most voices in the world. And so I worry about it a lot, but not just because it leads to misinformation about the

core issues. Of course, it also led to misinformation about COVID. We all know that. But the fact that most of us don't even know, I didn't know five years ago. I mean, I kind of thought tuberculosis was sort of like a 19th century disease of British poets. I had no idea that this year, a million and a half people are going to die of it. I struggle a lot about whether this has something to do with the algorithms and the internet which it definitely does but how much of it is sort of like human nature right because we know in our minds that context would be better to have and that we should care about all these problems we should hear about them but then you look at ratings and audience data and all this kind of stuff and

people people don't want to hear it people people don't want the vegetables they don't want the But then you look at ratings and audience data and all this kind of stuff and people are clicking. People don't want to hear it. People don't want the vegetables. They don't want the homework. They just want the good stuff. And, like, I also think the fractured media environment makes it difficult, too, because I think we try to offer people context here at Crooked Media. I know you guys do that all the time on YouTube and TikTok. But it's like I don't know how we get out of this because part of the problem seems to be

us and not just the algorithms. Totally. And by the way, I don't just mean like you say like, oh, like this is what people like, but it's also what I like, you know, like I also, I also like the clickbaitiest clickbait, you know, like I also want to know what happened with Trump's indictment this week way more than I want to know what happened in tuberculosis research this week, even though one is arguably more important than the other. And I don't know an easy way around that except to not optimize for attention, which is the economically irrational thing to do the way that our systems are set up now.

But I also think it's really important to remember that from a historical standpoint, it's not like the way things are is the way they have to be. And it's not because we know this because we can look in the past and we can see the way that these highly newspapers of the early 19th century were basically, many of them were sort of in the misinformation business, in the business of not only selling misinformation through advertisements of medicines that didn't work and miracle cures that didn't work, but also in the business of misinformation to their readers through the way they told news. And over time, I think we actually, I mean, people are very hard on journalism

and I know there's some reasons for that, but over time, I actually think that we built pretty strong systems to say like, well, no, that's not good journalism. And like, we don't approve. And so I think we can reform our systems to be better because I've seen examples of us doing it. I've seen examples of us building systems that are more inclusive, that better meet the needs of people who aren't centered by the social order or by existing power structures. And so I know

it's possible. So that's why I kind of can't respond to it just with despair. But boy, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't like close to despair some days. I think my biggest worry about sort of the internet, social media, and the way we get our information and news from our phones is that it is contributing, I think, to a sense of doomerism, especially among young people. And obviously, as you said, there's plenty of reasons to worry about the future. But in your review of humanity's temporal range, which I also loved, you wrote, For most of my life, I've believed we're in the fourth quarter of human history and perhaps the last days of it. But lately, I've come to believe that such despair only worsens our already slim chance of long term survival. What's your argument against

doomerism? Well, I guess my argument against doomerism would be that I really believe that hope is the correct response to consciousness. And that if you look at 250,000 years of human history, you see a lot of examples where hope led us forward and despair didn't, where hope helped us get to a better shared world and despair didn't. But also, I think the arc of human history does bend toward justice. I really believe that, as Martin Luther King famously said. And more importantly, I believe it can bend toward justice. And so I do think I was with my son. My son yesterday said to me, he's 13. He said, the difference between my generation and your generation is that we know that we're all doomed because of climate change and you didn't.

And at first I was like, well, first off, Henry, growing up in my household in the 1990s, I heard that we were doomed about climate change every day because my dad worked for the Nature Conservancy. So maybe that's why I'm a little prone to doomerism myself. But then I was like, but you know, it's a really good point, Henry, because you are exposed to these like constant existential threats, and not just existential threats, but like existential threats that were caused by human choice, by human neglect, by human systems of oppression. And that must be really, really difficult when you're 13. It must be really difficult to think about that stuff all the time and worry about it and feel like we're sort of monsters to each other. And it's hard to argue against, right? Because we are monsters to each other, and you never want to talk about hope in a way that minimizes the reality of injustice and the reality of pain. So many of us are in so much pain. And the last thing that people need to hear

when they're in pain is actually you should feel good because that's just not true. And so, how do you balance that with a need to also say, but I think there's a reason to go on, I think there's a reason to work toward a better shared future for us. I don't think we're in the fourth quarter of human history and I don't think we should act like it. I don't think that we should assume that we are the last people who will ever live because at least from my reading of history, and I don't think we should act like it. I don't think that we should assume that we are the last people who will ever live, because at least from my reading of history, people who do assume that tend to head us in the wrong direction. How did you get to that more hopeful place, or have you always sort of been there? To be honest, man, it's a fight. It's a fight every day. I'm not always in that place. You know, I've lived with depression and OCD for most of my life and I still do. And so, you know, I have, for me, I think this is true for a lot of people, but for me, like finding a path to hopefulness is not like a intellectual exercise it's like a it's like a necessity for survival and so i get there by fighting my way back there

each time and by believing you know i mean it's it's easy to forget this but like humans are amazing you know i mean amazing we think of Think of the music that we've made. Think of the ways that we've protected each other. Think of the kindness that we're able to show those we love, the ways we sacrifice for each other, the ways that we collaborate across time and space, how I can learn how to write from Shakespeare because he left me some signposts,

how we know what's keeping the stars apart for God's sakes. It's really remarkable and lovely. There's so much about us that's so beautiful. And so, I try to go back to that. I try to go back and remind myself that even when my brain tells me that there is no hope, that nobody cares about me, that there is no love in my life, that I'm merely a burden on those who I care about, et cetera, all the dirty lies that the brain will tell you, I try to remind myself that's not the whole story because a simple story is never the whole story. I always try to think that there's a choice, right? At the end of the day and it's do we try and we try to move forward and do we try to lift each other up and improve other people's

lives and be kind and generous or do we just give up? Right? Because we think that we can't change. And if we give up, like, that's fine. We can do that. But it's, to me, a little selfish, a little, you know, and like, it's also a guarantee that things aren't going to get better. Or at least it's a guarantee that we're not going to be participants, because then we're like, hoping someone else will take care of it. Yeah. And we're only here because things got better. We're only here because people tried. I often think about the fact that I'm only here because of antibiotics that were first synthesized in 1944. And so we are a direct product of the 198 billion people or so who came before us, and we hold in us their hopes, their dreams, their ambitions, and those who come after us will hold ours. You talked about a lot of this a few months ago during a lecture titled How the World Ends that you gave at a church at Harvard.

I absolutely loved it. Oh, thank you. It was just a wonderful, wonderful speech. And because, you know, I've been struggling with sort of the existential dread that comes, I think, with aging and also with like everything that we're involved in right now. Yeah, it is very weird. It's very weird that we're going to die. And it's very weird that we're inside of bodies. Yeah. And that's always been weird. And it's additionally weird now that we're living in a time where like every morning we wake up to news about like, like you said,

climate change, fascism, whatever. Mass murder. Mass murder, right? Like you pick it. It's there. But it was interesting to me because it was because I thought it was a profoundly theological speech. I'm a product of a Holy Cross Jesuit education, so I've thought about this a lot. What role has your faith played in sustaining your optimism? Oh, that's a really interesting question. I think that, you know, my relationship with my faith is pretty complicated, so complicated that I don starting to date, you had a very coherent, consistent theology that made sense, that answered the big questions around why does evil happen, why is there so much injustice in a way that didn't blame people who are suffering. I've always admired that about you, and I just don't have a coherent theology at all. And so I guess my answer to that question would be that some days it helps different ways than others, but the underlying concept for me is that I believe that I'm called

by my faith to act in this world. I don't know much else about what I'm called to do through the Gospels, but it does seem to me pretty clear that I'm called to act in this world. I don't know much else about what I'm called to do through the Gospels, but it does seem to me pretty clear that I'm called to act in this world. And there doesn't seem a lot of ambiguity about what I'm called to do because the businesses that the central figure in my religious tradition were up to were pretty straightforward, and they were feeding the poor and healing the sick and telling the marginalized and saying that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. Yeah. No, I mean, I've struggled with doubts that are probably only grown as the years have gone by with faith. But then I think you know like every religion just about every religion has at its core the golden rule right that like you can treat others and i'm like that that can't be a coincidence that over thousands and thousands of years different people different cultures

different parts of the world have all came to this understanding and i don't know that that can be explained through mere evolutionary ideas or what. Or maybe it can. Maybe it can. Yeah, I don't need... To me, one of the least interesting theological questions is whether God exists. I'm just not really interested in that question. Not going to solve it. Yeah, exactly. I know lots of people are interested in it. It sounds interesting when they talk to me about it. I just can't get that hyped up about it myself. But yeah, it's funny you should mention that.

My mentor, Eileen Cooper, wrote this beautiful children's book called The Golden Rule that looks at the way the golden rule was presented in many different cultures and contexts and historical periods. And you're right. Like it's a reminder to us

of our ultimate responsibility, which is to treat each other well. I think that in the end, I think the meaning of life is probably other people. I think it's being part of this great, sprawling, terrible, lovely human story. You spent so much of your career writing and talking about the joys and mysteries and meaning of life to younger audiences. Why? Why younger audiences? Well, I mean, a few reasons. I guess the biggest reason is that when I was a teenager, the books that I read that meant a lot to me meant a lot to me and still mean a lot to me and still first questioning of one's moral compass and responsibilities to self and others, all that stuff. That was really exciting to me. It remains a great honor and privilege. And then the other thing is that I just like... well, I'm going back and forth between past and present tense, which is something to note. But I like slash liked the time of life for writing about. It's a really good time of life as an American to write about. Think about all the great writers who've written

about coming of age from Mark Twain to Toni Morrison in a book like Zula. Obviously, I'm not going to be Mark Twain or Toni Morrison, but I love the connections between adolescents and America. We are kind of an adolescent nation in some ways. And so that's probably part of it too. And also they're just great characters, you know, because like when you're 16, you're engaging with the world intellectually with quite a lot of sophistication. I think more sophistication than adults tend to acknowledge. you're so new to it that you're asking the questions, the big questions about the meaning of life with this sort of like lovely, if like slightly cringy, absolute earnestness. I've been thinking about this a lot because I have a two-year-old now, it's my first child. And one thing that I've realized is I sort of forget a lot about my own childhood that I now started remembering.

Totally. Now that he's, you know, starting to talk and ask questions and just the questions that he asks and seeing everything start from scratch again. It's just, it's a really, it's a sort of a wonderful and sort of eye-opening experience every day yeah it's so exhausting uh especially being the parent of a really young child i mean i don't know it hasn't it doesn't get easier really it just gets different but um but it's also so encouraging i don't know there's something so encouraging to me about it to see the way that kids interact with the world around them yeah it helps it helps me feel hopeful. I'm going to ask you, how do you feel about the wave of book banning across the country that has included removals of The Fault in Our Stars and

Looking for Alaska? Well, this is going. I usually try to set a thoughtful line, but I actually, I think fascism is bad, hard stop. Yeah, it's super frustrating. I mean, in a lot of ways, I've been going through this and American writers have been going through this and, you know, American writers have been going through this for centuries, you know, certainly for over a hundred years. And the argument is always the same, which is that somehow our children are going to be massively corrupted by encountering the reality of experience in a novel and encountering the reality of feeling. But of course, if anything is offensive in a novel and it's true, what's offensive is the world, not the novel. And I don't particularly think that using the word fuck is obscene. And I don't particularly think that, you know, personally,

I don't think that, you know, acknowledging the existence of human sexuality is obscene. I do think it's quite obscene that, you know, we're going to lose so many people to gun violence this year when we know how to reduce the number of people we lose to gun violence because everywhere else in the world has done it. I think that's what librarians and teachers do. Librarians and teachers are the professionals that we have trained to make these decisions, to make decisions about how to educate our kids, to make decisions about what the books in our libraries should be. And I think we should trust them. That's what I think.

But also on a deeper level, you can't tell other people's kids what to read and then call yourself in favor of liberty. You can maybe tell your kids what to read, although they will reach an age where they decide for themselves. But you cannot order other people's kids to read this or that in school and not read that or this and call yourself a libertarian. Yeah. And also, look, as a parent, I understand the impulse to want to protect your child from the realities of the world. Yeah. Like you said said you might want to start with um uh something you can do about gun violence perhaps that's that's one way to protect them yeah real way and not protect them from something they're going to find out anyway

on their own or as they get older yeah and ultimately like look i think that there are things that shouldn't be in school libraries, right? Like I think there is explicit material that shouldn't be in school libraries, of course. But like my novels are not pornographic. They're just not. And if you find them pornographic, like that's super weird. And I don't like to judge, but it's just really weird to be like, oh, yeah, no, like I'm really into this work of pornography that's like a quiet novel about loss and guilt set at a boarding school in Alabama. Like, no, I don't believe you. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'm not going to accommodate that view. So, last question. Now that you've

written a beautiful book about humanity's contradictions using a five-star rating system, how would you rate the five-star rating system? Oh, that's a great question. I mean, if I'm in New York City and I need to find a public restroom, I will absolutely go to the public restroom that's 4.2 over the one that's 3.6 every time, right? Like I trust the people to tell me which restroom to use. And so on that level, it's very useful. And I use it all the time, right? Like we all do. But also it's ludicrous. It's absurd. Hamlet has a lower average Goodreads rating than the Anthropocene Reviewed. I love my work, but you cannot tell me that anyone would ever say, oh yeah, no, like Hamlet kind of sucks, but the Anthropocene reviewed, that's the shit right there, man.

No, it's a ludicrous, right? Because you cannot use a single data point to express the complexity of encountering a work of art. And also because your experience of that work of art will always be unique to you. I always think about this. I had this brutal, brutal breakup when I was in college. A lovely person, not their fault at all, but it was just devastating, heartbreaking. Everybody was heartbroken. And after we broke up, I was in Baltimore, I went to the Baltimore Museum of Art and I stood in front of the very impressive collection of Impressionist paintings at the Baltimore Museum of Art and I was just crying. Those paintings mean something to me that they don't mean to anyone else in the world. They were life-saving to me and life-giving to me in a way

that they aren't to anyone else. And they are life-giving to other people in other ways. Trying to distill those kinds of experiences to 3.2 is ludicrous. And we're obviously doing that for the benefit of recommendation algorithms, not for the benefit of each other as a species. If you take the internet out of it, nobody ever is like, hey, how was your dinner? It was like a 3.2. I grew up in the 90s. We never said that. Never. The idea didn't exist. And so that I'm concerned about. I'm concerned about the speed with which we will change our way of thinking about critical analysis to meet the needs of algorithms or of machines. That worries me a little bit. But on the other hand, like, what would I do

without that app that tells me how good a bathroom is? So two and a half stars. Okay, I thought I figured you were getting to two and a half. That's good. I was like, we're landing somewhere between two and three. John Green, thank you so much. This was a wonderful conversation. Appreciate you coming on offline. What a joy. It's great to be here.

Thank you. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with John as much as I did. After a short break, we'll be back for a quick conversation with Max Fisher about Elon Musk's latest efforts to drive people away from the platform he overpaid for. All right, we're back and I have Max Fisher with me. Hey, Max. Hey there. I know we talk about Twitter way too much on this podcast. True addicts.

But there have been quite a few developments over the last few weeks that have once again raised the question people have been asking ever since the platform was purchased by the world's second richest man, a.k.a. Elon Musk, a.k.a. Harry Balls, which is what he changed his name to

as some kind of a post-April Fool's joke that was just missing the humor. He's so funny. He's so funny. He's so funny. He's so funny. I love his political commentary, too. And his humor. You know what he said?

Do you know what he said? He said his dog is the CEO of Twitter. You can't. You can't. That's just. Yeah. That's great stuff. That's super funny.

So anyway, here are the developments that have happened at Twitter. Twitter briefly blocked or restricted or shadow banned links to Substack, which is a subscription newsletter platform because they came out with Substack Notes, which Elon views as a competitor to Twitter. This drove some Substack writers off Twitter, most notably one-time Elon fanboy Matt Taibbi, author of the Twitter files.

He's now on Truth Social. So there you go. What an arc that guy has had. That's a real arc. Talk about the horseshoe. He's now on Truth Social. So there you go. What an arc that guy has had. That's a real arc. Talk about the horseshoe. He's all the way around. Twitter briefly labeled NPR and BBC state-affiliated media outlets, which is what the platform has traditionally used for propaganda outlets

and authoritarian regimes like Russia and China. After NPR reminded Twitter that they only receive a tiny bit of government funding and have complete editorial independence, they changed the label to government funded. But NPR said, fuck you, and announced they'd stop using Twitter because it doesn't really drive traffic and also can't be trusted anymore. Elon also removed the New York Times verification badge for no apparent reason and has said that all other legacy verification badges will disappear at the end of the week on 420. Again, because he has the sense of the week on 420.

Again, because he has the sense of humor of an eighth grader from the 90s. That's what we're working with here. And finally, he just gave an interview to the BBC, the state-affiliated BBC, where he confirmed that he's laid off more than 5,000 employees, claimed that Twitter is roughly breaking even, said he only bought it because a judge was about to make him, announced that his dog is CEO, like you mentioned, and floated that he might sell the platform if the right buyer comes along. Boy, I bet he would. Yeah, no kidding. All right. So how big of a deal do you think each of those developments are? So I kind of rank them in my head as like small deal, medium deal, really, really big

deal. And I think the small, like sub stackack notes thing i think looks very shocking because we're not used to twitter outright censoring its rivals this is something that a lot of social platforms do though or they won't like block all links but like youtube links on facebook have always been really ugly and that's deliberate and it's designed to like block competitors and they're like substack is just not i think really a viable competitor to Twitter anyway. And they removed the block. I think it was only up for six days.

So there was a little bit of a freak out over that. But I think that's actually not so unusual. I think if they had kept it, it would have been a bigger deal. Partly because I think Twitter thrives on a small subset of people who are like big tweeters. And I think that a lot of the sub stack writers are big Twitter people. And so if you had lost a lot of them, I think that could have been a bit of a problem for them. I also think it's just, you know, fucking free speech platform, Twitter, right? Waving the free speech banner. It's like censoring, you know potential

competitors right right i mean there's always been an irony to the like ultra free speech flag which for no apparent reason substack has decided to like tie itself to in the worst most self defeating possible way at a time when they're also losing a ton of money yeah so that's all right so that's a small one that's a small deal yeah yeah and you're so the i think the like deliberately antagonizing new york times npr bbc also pbs which has also said they're not going to use the platform anymore is i think that's a little bit of a bigger deal because first of all he's doing it for no apparent reason except the like delight of his fans and he says that he derives personal enjoyment from it, which I honestly believe that as the explanation.

It's one of the only true things he's said recently. And I think it's like it is important to remember that Twitter on its own as a platform has no content and therefore no monetary value. All of the value comes from people posting on the platform. So if you go after media agencies, which have traditionally been the big primary drivers of content on the platform, and is why people go to it, because it's a clearinghouse for links and a clearinghouse for news, not a clearinghouse for links or news anymore, it becomes less worthwhile. Now, I don't think that's going to lead to a bigger death spiral, because I think because there is no viable alternative to Twitter, I think very few other news agencies are going to leave it. So I don't think this is going to be like everybody will flee Twitter and it will collapse.

But I think that he is hurting pointlessly the financial viability of the platform at a time when he really, really cannot afford to do that. I think the financials are a thing that don't get discussed as much as as like the platform doesn't work and it's like blocking rivals and it's like antagonizing PBS. But like, I think those are actually really dire for Twitter. Well, let's talk about the financial stuff because I know you think that's a bigger deal. Yeah. Yeah. So Twitter has never really made money. It's only been profitable two years in its entire existence, 2018, 2019. And Musk claims that it is roughly breaking even. I do not believe him because it was not going to break even. When you say roughly breaking even, I know you can tell. Okay. How rough is that?

Right. Right. Yeah. It's a very notable choice of words. I mean, Twitter was probably not going to break even this year, even if he had not bought it, but he bought it. A ton of advertisers, which drive all of the like $5 billion a year in revenue of the company, fled because they don't like the way it's running. He just said in that BBC interview, he's like, just about all of them are back. I was like, that's not, that's not right.

You can use the platform and you can tell that like the ads are like, they're garbage. It's like not, you're not seeing like high quality ads. And his big plan to replace that has been Twitter blew the subscription service. The idea that you will pay $8 a month to use it, and basically nobody... Get your blue check. Yeah, right. Get that blue check to own the lib.

And no one wants to pay the $8 on the lib fee. I think they have... So they will not say, and they're not required to because they're privately owned, will not say how many paying subscribers they have. You can use, and there's some researchers who are like, go into the API to check how many people have Twitter blue. And it's just under 300,000, which translates to,

how much is that? $28 million a year, even if all those people were paying and we know they're not. And $28 million a year, if you're trying to replace a couple billion in advertising revenue, like I'm not a math expert. Well, I mean, just for context, the last quarterly earnings report they put out when they were a public company, this was Q2 of 2022, was $1.2 billion in revenue. So I think that $28 million doesn't sound like that's much less.

And I think this is a lot more dire than gets appreciated for two reasons. One is that even if he made money at Twitter, he's not going to make money because Twitter owes interest on the $14 billion loan that he took out to buy it. He was forced by a judge basically to take out to buy it, or he was forced by a judge basically to take out to buy it, $1.2 billion a year in interest because he got this very high interest loan because he did not want the loan to be in his books. They're actually on Twitter's books. And that's a lot of money to cover for a company that also loses money. Like, how is it going to pay that? And the other reason I think it's really dire is that Musk is not super liquid right now.

I mean, he's not super liquid right now. He's, I mean, he's worth, you know, almost 200 billion, but that's basically all tied up in Tesla stock. And Tesla stock is like not doing well. It's down, it's up a little bit from its low. So it dropped to about a third of its value towards the end of last year. And it's now up to about half of its prior value, but it's like... So when does the shit hit the fan on the financial stuff here? Like if he has to pay the interest on that loan. Right. So I think the really telling thing here is that I have always believed

that you can tell that the health of a social media platform, the last place you want to talk to or go figure that out is the users because users are always going to complain about being on social media. It's just like what we do. But if you go to like what does Wall Street think, I think it's much more telling. And because Twitter is not public, we don't have a stock price we can look at. But that interest, that loan that he took out is something that Wall Street has been trying to sell. That's like the banks that loaned out the money to him and trying to sell that off to investors is what they do. And they have said,

the banks have come out and said, no one wants to buy this loan because they don't think it's worth anything because they don't think Elon Musk can pay it off. They were getting offers of 60 cents on the dollar, which is catastrophic for a loan that they just made of 14 billion. And so they were in talks with Elon Musk of restructuring it so that it would be in Tesla stock as collateral. And I think that when these shit hits the fan is when it starts to really imperil Tesla's stock price, which we have already gotten really, really close to a couple of times. Musk sold off a bunch of his Tesla shares at the end of last year to buy Twitter. That was part of what, in addition to Tesla having a bad year, drove the stock price to just crater. Because if you're an investor in Tesla, you know

what looks really bad? The head of Tesla selling off all of his shares in it. So he has pledged not to sell off shares in Tesla for the next two years, but he might have to. Because otherwise, how's he going to pay that? Right. Otherwise, how's he going to pay the $1.2 billion? If he has to restructure this loan because Twitter can't pay it, he's going to need to put up a bunch of Tesla stock. And something he has always done is he has always financially entangled all of his companies. They all loan each other money. They own pieces of each other.

They just got workers going across them. And that was always okay because Tesla was always going to the moon with its stock price. And now that it's not true, and the investors in Tesla are looking for their money, and some of them are threatening to sell off even more than they already have. I mean, I don't think the whole house of cards is going to fall tomorrow. But I think as long as he's got all of this money tied up in Twitter and all of his attention tied up in Twitter, it's a real risk for him. So the question now is, is Twitter in a death spiral? Obviously, when he first bought it in those early months, there was like, oh, this is the end. And everyone's like saying their

goodbyes on Twitter. And that did not come to pass. You're not on Mastodon? I have not been tooting recently. Oh man, it is popping off on the Don. Follow me on Mastodon for more commentary. I have not even, I will not even go to the site. I don't know what the site is. Is it an app? I don't even, I can't even tell you. I literally don't know. Okay, so that didn't happen. And Elon was celebrating this in the interview with the BBC.

He's like, oh, all the haters said that, you know, Twitter was going to die and it's alive. I will say, though, I feel like in the last, and again, this is in the category you mentioned of users complaining, but like in the last couple of months, it has seemed buggy. It has seemed a little dead. It's really janky. It is also like what you were just saying about the NPR, New York Times stuff, like it's become fewer people that I followed all the time who tweeted all the time are tweeting now. I'm one of them. I don't tweet as much anymore. Yeah, I tweet a lot. And so it is just like news links.

Yeah. And I wonder if instead of it just like disappearing overnight like everyone was afraid of, it's just going to be sort of a slow decline to. I think that's right. I mean, I think the big question will be, is there a place where users like you and I, by which I mean degenerate addicts, can go? Because I still check it like 300 times a day. My tweeting is less. My checking has not really declined that much. Yeah, I think that's right. And I still like, you know, I was following some stuff that's like going on in China that I couldn't figure out.

And I like wasn't quite satisfied with the news stories. And I went to Twitter and there's like some great commentary there. So I still, I personally get value from it. I don't want it to collapse. Well, this brings us to the question of potential alternatives,

because the last couple of months have made me think, OK, I've always complained about Twitter. I think it was bad for me. I think it's bad for the world. But there are certain aspects of what the platform has offered in the past that I do think are valuable. For sure. Basically, as a news aggregator, I need a news aggregator.

Yeah. I don't want to just go to the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN Politico and just these and just look for the news because I want a wider breadth of commentary of reporting. So need a news aggregator. I do like that it's a place where you can go and find smart people offering. I know that's like hard to find those people, but they're there offering interesting insight and commentary. And then there's like a frivolous need, which is like, you know what, when something big is going on in the world or the country, it's like good to jump on somewhere and get instant. It's a little fun. It's a little fun. Like Trump's getting arraigned. Where do you want to go? You want to go on Twitter? Right, right. Although that part of the platform I feel has been broken, like almost to the point of beyond repair because the feed is so algorithmic now that's like Trump is getting arraigned.

And like, here are some tweets from three days ago that were like a little funny. And it's like, it's great. That's great. Thank you, Twitter. Yeah. And so that doesn't come back again. Not the end of the world, whatever. We all had our we all had our Twitter era.

Right. But I do think the other two are important. And I was wondering, when I saw that Substack had created notes before the throttling that Elon gave them, I sort of went over to check out the notes. And it is like a quieter place. Because the notes are just like, it does look a lot like Twitter. You can understand why Elon thought it was a competitor. You can restack instead of retweet. But when you go on there, you only follow the people

who you subscribe to their newsletters, which is, again, a very self-selecting group, which is fine because I only subscribe to newsletters for people that I give a shit about. So watching them all comment is not a bad alternative. Although they had some trouble. Chris Best, who's one of the founders of Substack, conducted an interview with Nilay Patel.

And Nilay was like, hey, what about racism on your platform? Do you not want that? Because Substack's whole thing is like free speech, free speech. They're all free speech people. What an easy question. Just say you don't like it. He goes, I don't want to get into content moderation questions about what I, what I will and won't allow on the platform. And he's like, yeah, but like, if it becomes overrun with racism and transphobia, like

you wouldn't like that. He's like, I'm not going to get into it. You're like, what, what? Now it's interesting because he did say at one point we have content moderation policies. They do have a content moderation policies, not much, but it basically the content guidelines are no hate speech against protected classes that incites violence. No doxing people. So like pretty basic shit. But I did.

I listened to another interview that they did. The two founders did with Kara Swisher. And they basically said that even though they have a content moderation policy, the reason it's so bare bones is because they see their platform more like WordPress, which is software you use to create your own website. And basically, if a Nazi created a website on WordPress, you wouldn't blame WordPress. You'd blame the Nazi. Right. And they're basically saying that Substack, because there is no algorithm just showing you shit, but you're just subscribing and paying to writers that you like, then they're just sort of a platform and they're not like Twitter and that. It does feel like a meaningful distinction. It's not great for Substack that we're the ones having to explain that to people instead of like Substack.

Yeah, like that could have been a, yeah, maybe could have thought about some talking points before your interview, buddy. It's too bad they have no money whatsoever to pay us for this free image consulting we're doing. I mean, I think what's really striking about Substack, like really stumbling into trying to do a Twitter competitor is no one else has tried to do it. Like you would think all of the big incumbents in Silicon Valley would look at Elon blowing up twitter and look at like all of the twitter users saying like hey i would love to go literally anyplace else and just like set up an alternative service which would be extremely cheap for a microsoft or google or a facebook to do but they're not doing it i think because they just they don't see it as a profitable business which i think speaks to the like weird place that is in, which is that it is something

essential or hard to break away from for its user base, which is not growing, but is pretty large. But it's not a viable enough business for it to make money or for anyone to launch a competitor, which is why I think you're right that we're going to be stuck with some zombie version of Twitter for a really long time because people want that service, but there's no reason for someone else to set it up. I mean, it really is the one social platform, I think that has the strongest case for like, should it be a public utility? Right.

The Substack guys also said to Kara that they have, that their view of like why Substack is going to be a thing is that social media is moving in two directions. And it's either going to be the TikTok direction where it's all algorithmic lizard brain just giving you what you want, dopamine hit kind of stuff. I love it. Basically your whole book.

Short form, really short, super short form stuff. Or it's going to be you pay for like relationships with writers, thinkers, whatever who you want to hear from. You're willing to read more long form stuff. And it's more about like what you choose to read and stuff like that. And so there's two different directions, but that like anything in the middle is sort of going to get lost. Is this the place for us to plug the Crooked Media subscribers? Yeah, anyway, come join our Discord, everyone. We have great content. Everyone's very nice. Well, it's funny though, she asked them about who they view as their

competitors and they mentioned Discord's doing some interesting stuff with community on the community side. There is. I mean, it's something that you and I have talked about is that we have, and I think a lot of people like us have in our own content, like consumption habits shifted a lot to smaller kind of corralled services. Like I'm on a bunch of slacks and like, I'm not on discords, but I'm on similar things. And like, I would pay to be in those spaces because they do have a lot of value for me. Well, this is the last point I'll make on this and then we can end it is my theory of it's not like a very ingenious theory but like if elon wasn't such a dick i could have i could see a scenario where people would have paid to subscribe to twitter yeah still not as not as many as i think they need but like when all you he is now in the customer service business right and he he thinks he is a

he's a troll who's also like the head of customer service at twitter and all he does is like he's attacking the new york times he's dunking on the libs like who the fuck wants to pay for that to just be like to have the guy who owns the platform just like making asshole-ish jokes and dunking on people all the time. I think that's and I think it shows how Twitter from Jack Dorsey or whoever, I forget who took over after Jack Dorsey to Elon Musk has shifted. It's like core audience that they are trying to serve that it used to be. And the people who they would have gone after for a subscription product were people like you and me yes or like big media companies which were always their like core of the business the people where they're really trying to court and i think you're right that they could have by saying like we have these new bespoke services for you that are going to help you with spaces

or broadcasts i think they could have gotten a lot of money out of because those are people who would pay and have because their institutional would have paid and now the people the customer base that the elon era twitter is trying to serve is like cat turd too is the like right-wing trolly like culture war because that's his fan base and i think that he cannot in his own mind separate out wanting to serve a customer base who will bring him like financial success for his company and like wanting a fan base for him personally because i think he can't in twitter at least he can't differentiate between himself and the company and maybe he doesn't want to and if it were not for that loan i think he could

afford to get away with it but i don't know if he can when he has to pony up that 1.2 billion at a time when the tesla stock price is though at a time when he needs collateral. And so instead, we are all stuck in the cat turd two era of zombie Twitter. That's where we are. I love it. Max Fisher, thanks for joining. Thank you. 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. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.