Offline with Jon Favreau - Trump's TikTok Dilemma, Crypto Cons Debunked, and The Truth About the Loneliness Epidemic

Episode Date: January 26, 2025

TikTok is back from the dead... at least for now. After a self-imposed shutdown and a shameless appeal to President Trump, the countdown to the TikTok ban has restarted. Meanwhile, the rest of Silicon Valley is taking turns kissing the ring. Jon and Max discuss the list of tech oligarchs vying for Trump's favor, explain what they have to gain from the President's new Stargate AI announcement, and debate if it's time to pump their life savings into $TRUMP a new "meme coin" launched by the President that's managed to annoy even the most ardent MAGA crypto bros. The guys walk through the grift, and discuss how a Supreme Court case on age verification for porn sites could be a great safeguard for kids on social media. Then, Max sits down with Derek Thompson, author of this month's cover story in The Atlantic, to talk about why people don’t equate social isolation with loneliness, and what this means for our society and politics. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

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As I was reporting for this piece, my wife pointed out a trend on TikTok that is sometimes called cancellation. That is the elation of friends canceling plans on you. And in this trend, you see young people dancing, sometimes in very funny and goofy ways, to the revelation that their plans on a Friday or Saturday night have been canceled. So what are we looking at here? We're looking at the most socially isolated generation

in recorded history, turning on their phones, and celebrating with a dance when hangouts are canceled. That's not a phenomenon of loneliness. That is something else. We are choosing social isolation rather than feeling the natural, healthy, biological impulse of loneliness in getting up off the couch. I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, host of the excellent podcast, Plain English, and author of this month's cover story in the Atlantic, Derek Thompson. Max, you sat down with Derek this week to talk about that story, which is called The Anti-Social Century. Sounds very offline. What Derek have to say? I love talking to Derek. He has this incredible ability to use one phrase that completely reframes how I think

about something and he really changed so much of how I think about the loneliness and social isolation epidemic in America. One thing that I will highlight is that I had always thought of this as something that is happening to other people. I had just associated with the kind of like extreme edge cases, you know, the like lonely teen and their parents face-based. The manosphere. Right, the manosphere and he really made me see

that this is something that is happening to all of us and that we are all without realizing it, making these small choices that we're choosing to participate in this rise in social isolation and it's having this profound effect on us in ways that I think we are just beginning to understand. So give me a lot to chew on. I have had that piece,

my browser has had that piece up for a long time. I've been meaning to read it, and so now I'm gonna read it and listen to your interview, and I'm very excited for both. It's good, it's a zippy read, and it says, it's not, I was worried it was gonna be what I thought it was gonna say,

but it surprised me. Great. All right before we get to your interview with Derek we got a lot of news to cover including Donald Trump's celebratory foray into cryptocurrency, a half trillion dollar investment in artificial intelligence that has his buddy Elon Musk big mad. They're all buddies up there. And a Supreme Court case about pornography that may have some unintended positive consequences for the way young people use social media. I got a hot take for you. Have to convince me on that.

You got to hang out for the hot take because it gets contrarian. All right. But first, TikTok, it's back. It's back from the dead. It is back. For now. John, what did you do in the 18 hour TikTok outage? How did you cope?

See, I'm not addicted to TikTok. I never did it for me. That's crazy. You were the only person, you were addicted to every social media app but TikTok didn't hook you. It's wild. I don't know why. I, you know, and it's not like I never use it either.

I do, and then I do about like, you know, I'll do five, 10 minutes, maybe a couple times a week, less maybe, and then I do about like you know I'll do five ten minutes maybe a couple times a week less maybe and then I'm like that's all I'm just one hit a crack and then just put the pipe down I don't listen I wish we all had that your strength I certainly don't think it's strength I don't know what it is anyway last week on Saturday night the popular video service was taken offline in compliance with the nationwide ban that was set to go into effect on Sunday the the 19th. Users who opened the app were met with a message that read, a law banning TikTok has been enacted

in the US. And unfortunately, that means you can't use it right now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned. Just 14 hours later, Trump announced he would sign an executive order on his first day in office to extend the period before the TikTok ban is enacted. TikTok immediately brought service back online

and Trump paused the law for 75 days, which is where we are right now. Donald Trump, Gen Z hero. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, Gen Z killjoys. What do you think? Did Trump's shamelessness pay off here? Is this a short-lived reprieve? What's gonna happen?

So we should talk a little bit about this gambit that TikTok and Trump set off on jointly. It is even worse than it looks because TikTok shutdown was completely self-imposed. Biden said he's not gonna enforce the shutdown. Trump said he was gonna do it. Which on its own is, by the way, pretty weird. It is.

It was a weird choice. Yeah, the law that I signed, I'm not going to enforce. We're going to throw this in Trump's lap. I know. And then TikTok was like, no, we want to shut down because then we want everyone to get mad at the politicians who shut us down. Right. Which is what they did.

Right. So TikTok pretended to be shut down for a day to gin up this big win for Trump as this quid pro quo, incredibly transparent in which TikTok has, I think it's worth dwelling on this, number one, used its platform to lie to its 170 million users about what happened and two, signal to Trump that it will happily manipulate those users on his behalf if he promises to help them skirt the law. Now, what does that tell you about TikTok as a reliable news source or an unbiased source of information, much less the resistance?

Yeah, do you want your brain pickled by the CCP or do you want it pickled by the MAGA folks? They're in hock to both. It's both. TikTok, that's the only platform that is so openly in hawk to both Trump and to the Chinese government. And TikTok has made clear, has said to all of its users, we will manipulate you to please these two power brokers because we have to. And then everyone's like, I'm not being manipulated. I'm just looking at the recipes and some fun dance and all the other wonderful stuff that has nothing to do with politics. I know. I know. Like if this, if nothing else has scared you off of TikTok, the fact that they are willing

to lie and manipulate you this flagrantly for a political quid pro quo with a corrupt Trump like should really tell you something. It seems like TikTok still needs to find a US buyer. Trump has indicated he'd be open to Elon Musk, surprise, surprise, or Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, another Trump donor, buying the app, and that he'd be open to approving a 50% ownership stake of the app rather than a full sale, like US government ownership? It's not clear what he meant, right? Yeah, and it's also he seems to think that ByteDance is supposed to pay him for the sale.

It's NATO funding all over again. Also, it seems like Beijing for the first time is now open to potentially allowing a sale of ByteDance. Or a partial sale. A partial sale, which is new. I know. Which I did not think was going to happen. Is worrying, yes. Yes, but as you not think was going to happen. It is worrying.

Yes. But as you pointed out when we were talking about this before, this was after a call between Trump and Xi. Yes. So who knows what happened in that call? This is almost like what worries me more than the ban itself and the fact of TikTok manipulation itself is that Trump has invested so much political capital in telling everyone that he is going to save TikTok, he's going to save TikTok. Xi Jinping has him over a fucking barrel now. Like, who knows what he's going

to trade away to get this win? Like, we're not going to stop at Taiwan? Like, is Japan going to become part of China now? Well, it also seems like Trump and TikTok users are now in violent agreement because Trump was like, well, data privacy concerns, like, how much data, how much info do our kids really have? Who cares if China gets our kids info? That doesn't really matter much. And the kids are like, you know, we're right.

I know. So the kids want their data to go to China. Trump wants their data to go to China. Just that's it. What does it tell you that the things that you learn on TikTok and the worldview you learn on TikTok just over and over ends up in alignment with Donald Trump and what he wants? What does that tell you about this platform?

I was told that TikTok is showing me the kind of on-the-ground journalism that no one else does in the world. Just TikTok. Someone sent me a TikTok. I have to say before you, I feel bad. I feel bad and I'm trying to figure this out because every time we talk about TikTok, I just can't like,

and then after we talk about it, I go and it happens on our Discord too, cause I love our Discord users. People get very mad at it, they think that we're very snarky about this, that we're very snarky about this, that we're snide about it. And I don't wanna be snide, but there are people who make a living on TikTok. And I think for those people,

that's who I feel the worst for, if there was a ban, right? For the people who are like, I'm just watching videos and I deserve to, great, I get it. I get that some of it's fun. I get that a lot of people who like TikTok don't like it because they're getting their news from it.

I totally understand that. There's a whole bunch of other things on TikTok to watch that aren't news. That's all fine. I get it. But it's also true that a lot of people are getting their news from TikTok. A huge amount of people. And I think if you're getting your news from TikTok, it's a problem. I mean, just look at the exit polls where it's something like I think it's either 50 or

Slightly more than 50% of people who get their news for tik-tok voted for Trump people get their news from the newspaper like 80% Of them voted for Kamala Harris. I want a lot of people to Some of the same people are like well, I get I get my news from tik-tok and it's fine Don't worry about it. It's like they would also say and have said now for years that getting your news from Facebook is problematic. And like now getting your news from X, you know, run by Elon Musk is problematic. So like just extend it to this other app which is now controlled now, but now is a MAGA CCP joint venture.

So I want to talk a little bit about this idea that you see out there that is very widespread, that Trump made himself the savior of Gen Z by rescuing this wildly popular app used by half of the country, and that this is a humiliating loss for Democrats who have lost Zoomers for a generation. And I think that we are all getting social mediaed

into thinking that the TikTok ban was super unpopular and that Gen Z really wanted TikTok save because that does not hold up in polling the polling shows that only 28% of the country opposed the ban that's half of the most recent polling because I know the polling has changed so that is that is the most recent Pew poll which is the big shift of of the number used to be even smaller for the people who oppose the ban. This is the big jump up. It's now it's up to 28%.

Oh, but it was lower before. It was even lower, yes. And it's slightly more than that 32% support the ban. And at 28% number, that is half the share of people who use TikTok. Half of the people in this country use TikTok. Only a quarter of people in the country oppose banning it. So this Trump's policy of saving TikTok has 28% popular support.

Doesn't have very popular. Yeah. I mean, I guess among Gen Z. I'm sure it's higher than 28% among Gen Z. I mean, we've talked about this poll before. One in three people who use TikTok say the world will be better off if TikTok did not exist I'm sure a lot of people are unhappy about it not being there

But I think this is a case ironically enough of people getting their view of reality Distorted by social media because who are the people who are angriest about tick tock and take it away social media super uses So we say oh well look at how unpopular this is but it's's not. Going to be the loudest voice, loudest voices. Right. And the most unpopular voices. I do think it's one of those things, it's one of those actions though that probably break through the noise of typical politics. Okay, that's true.

Because if you are a TikTok user and you are not politically inclined and you do not consume a lot of politics or a lot of news from TikTok and suddenly your favorite app is taken away, boom, now you're political. and suddenly your favorite app is taken away. Boom, now you're political. Look, I think that there is truth to that, but I would just say that the share of people who support the ban is even larger. And I think we're talking about a lot of parents.

So I think that's true. Could break through to people who don't pay attention to politics, but I think that's true on both sides. I think some people who think that like, this app is really fucking harmful for me or for my kids or someone I care about, I think that's true on both sides. I think some people who think that like, this app is really fucking harmful for me or for my kids or someone I care about, you know, it could be persuaded by it,

but I think that we risk overstating the idea that like all of Gen Z wants TikTok saved when that just is not reflected in the data. Well, it sounds like they're gonna get it. They're gonna get it saved. I mean, I am having, anything could happen, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It's 2025. Right, right, right, the anything could happen, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 2025.

Right, right, right. The law isn't real anymore. But it feels to me like we are more likely now to see TikTok saved than TikTok shut down because it feels like Trump with this law is going to figure out a deal, some kind of a deal. And also it appears that the law, and we've talked about this before, the law gives the president a lot of authority to determine whether the divestiture is sufficient. And so you can see some shuffling around of ownership and whether it's Musk or Larry Ellison

or some consortium or whatever else, and then Trump being like, okay, we're good. So the big plan that he keeps pushing is he wants a partial sale. This is what he thinks will get CCP sign off if they get to keep a big chunk of the company and then we'll also allow him to comply with the law. You and I were recording, we're going like back and forth through the text of the law, trying to figure out whether or not that's true, which is just like a great way for us to get in trouble. Here at the law firm of Favreau Fisher and Associates, we've read the law and here's what we think it says about a partial divestiture legality.

Look, we can't do worse than anyone in the Trump administration. That's true. I will say, I do think that because this is even potentially a gray area, would it comply with the law to do a partial divestiture could be a huge problem because any buyer is going to need financing. Half of TikTok is $50 billion. No one has that sitting in their bank account. And it's going to be very hard to find a bank that will sign off on a $50 billion loan towards an acquisition that could get smashed by the courts because it's in this legal gray area.

We hope that Trump will continue to be okay with it won't change his mind. One data point you still cannot download TikTok on the Apple Store. Because Apple is so worried about legal exposure. If you want to fuck an iPhone with TikTok on it, you have to buy it on eBay for a few thousand dollars. Really? Yes. Wow, someone should start collecting those.

Well, you've got one because you're the only person who's not addicted to the app. My iPhones with TikToks on them just became pretty valuable. It did, yes. So with all of which is to say it's not just that like you or I or Trump or a buyer have to think technically this is within the law. A bank has to think we're gonna gamble $50 billion on this being within the law. And that is a pretty high bar here.

And hope that the courts. Hope that the courts won't step in. Hope that Trump won't change his mind. It's also tough though to find someone with standing to sue over this. I was wondering about that too. Like who is the, is it Zuckerberg? Who is injured by a qualified divestiture that someone, who's going to say that wasn't

qualified enough? Like who's the injured party there? That's the whole thing I wanted to know. We haven't gotten into this yet in our legal close readings of the law, but that all stays in. Stay tuned for when John and Max take the LSATs. Offline is brought to you by 3Day Blinds. It's 2025. Why aren't my blinds smart and automated like the rest of my home? Are your blinds still from 2005? There's a better

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Turns out the TikTok fiasco is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the new Alliance between the president and his tech bros. At the inauguration, the row of seats behind Trump, not the cabinet, not the incoming cabinet. Is it the cabinet is the question. Basically, yeah. No, it was the richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and of course Elon. On Tuesday, Trump announced a 500 billion dollar investment by the federal government to build artificial intelligence infrastructure for AI giants Oracle, OpenAI, and Nvidia. Max, we talked a lot about this relationship last week. Probably going to spend the next four years talking about it because that is our curse. So let's

focus on this AI deal. One person not at the deal, Elon Musk. Yes. Boy, is he pissed about it. But before we get to that, let's talk about what the deal is. Why is Trump trying to do a half a trillion dollar deal with these tech companies? So it's honestly kind of unclear what this deal actually is. We know it's called Project Stargate. The Trump administration, along with, like you said, OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle have all pledged to collectively raise $500 billion towards this, but it's not clear how much of that is actually going to be federal money.

And it sounds like basically what it's going to be for is building data centers. AI, as we have discussed many times, seems to have hit a wall in terms of what it can do, which is not very much and certainly nothing that can produce enough of a profit to justify the costs. The big AI companies are all massively into debt, trying to make AI into something useful and profitable and their hope here is that by building many many more of these data centers I mean like picture multiple football fields filled with like ultra high-end computers and servers they can finally use land and not to mention energy not water not to mention all of our limited resources that they can finally make so that will somehow push AI over the line

and it will become something useful and profitable. Can it become like a NIMBY on... For data centers? For AI data centers? Yeah. NIMBY on housing, NIMBY on the AI data centers, that's where I am. I say convert all of the data centers

into mixed use walkable urbanism. That's my fucking platform. Good. So it's not clear, like, is this a giant handout to the AI companies? Is he just waving his arms and then hoping that that will generate fundraising for it? It's not really clear.

I don't know how many of our tax dollars are now going to go towards funding AI slop on Instagram, but it seems like probably at least a few billion. Elon Musk was very unhappy with all of this. Love to see that. He said, this is fake, they don't have the money. So that was his message. And then he and Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI,

founder and CEO of OpenAI, they got in a bit of a slap fight online over this. Yes, Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, which he used to be on the board of over some esoteric interpersonal bullshit, which he used to be on the board of over some esoteric interpersonal bullshit, which is one data point suggesting maybe ByteDance would not want to sell partial ownership to him because he's a nightmare to do business with because he's on so much ketamine. Or maybe he's not. Or maybe he's not. Maybe he's just

having a good time. Anti-defamation training. Sorry, just kicked in. Austin's sweating over there in the corner. Everybody over there in the corner. Everybody's crying in the studio. So, you know, according to some reports. That'll do it. That'll do it. So, let's talk about Sam Altman, who went from resistance figure. I know. In fact, on the Pod Save America that is out Friday, today as we're recording it, Dan Pfeiffer

was talking about how he was in a meeting about stopping Trump with Sam Altman just years ago. Then there was the people were bringing up old tweets from Sam Altman about like, thanks Reid Hoffman for helping to defeat Donald Trump. And then he had like a poll, he did a Twitter poll once and he was like, what should we call Donald Trump? Dangerous Donald, it was just like the worst resistance shit. And so now, after this whole announcement,

after the election, this is what he tweeted this week. Watching POTUS more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him. I wish I had done more of my own thinking and definitely fell in the NPC trap. I'm not going to agree with him on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways." That's not an untrue statement. He will be incredible for the country in many ways. I don't know what kind of connotation we're using.

You're saying, boy, this is like looking at Melania in the I'm So Over It jacket all over again. What's going on with Sam Altman? I mean, look. What is the NPC trap? So this is a trope in Silicon Valley that says NPC, which is a video game thing. Right. I know that. That's like non-player character.

Yeah, that you're just following the herd and everyone else said that Trump is bad. But then I thought for myself, and I realized, whoa, this guy who is lifting all the regulations on my company and giving me maybe $500 billion, it turns out he's good, actually. We all have TDS, right? That's right. We have Trump Derangement Syndrome,

so it's like the NBC trap. Yeah, I mean, look, this is obviously an arc that we have seen, like, not every major Silicon Valley figure, there are some holdouts. Far too many. Far too many. A huge number of them have gone on and like yes, some of it is the fact that it's just like it's just greed. It's just like wanting a handout. It's just not having any principles. But I really do think that this is ultimately an economic story that is larger than anyone personality. We've talked about it before. The rise in interest rates a couple years

ago just fundamentally ended the Silicon Valley business model. As we have known in the internet era, it was always built on near zero interest rates since 2007 when they went down. And a lot of the industry has just pivoted since then because they have to, or because they believe they have to, into white collar criminality, exploiting consumer data, monopolistic market capture, crypto Ponzi schemes, which we're gonna talk about. In the case of AI wanting to just, I guess, be wildly unregulated is really important to them

because the Biden administration have very strong AI regulations. So they kind of just need a Trump figure who is gonna say, okay, do your white collar criminality, but you just have to give me a taste and kick up some of the profits to me. And as you saw this week, I don't know if you saw this, Trump said interest rates must go down. Yes, he's very adamant about interest rates.

That'll do it. Right, which is going to be great for Silicon Valley. You mentioned the crypto schemes. You know, Trump in the lead up to the inauguration, Trump and Melania launched a pair of meme coins, aka shit coins. And the guy who did the sermon at the inauguration launched a meme coin too. Yeah, he got his beak wet too. Which immediately skyrocketed in value, netting the Trumps, at least on paper, billions of dollars. Although it has since

halved. I was gonna say, yeah. So now they've come down. But can you explain to people like why this is a scam and why? And what was most interesting to me is a lot of crypto supporters and crypto Trump supporters were very disappointed. I know, which I had to fucking roll my eyes because they are in the exact same business. This is the business. Okay. So I know this might look like it is Trump just making money off his supporters

by selling them some more Trump branded garbage, but this is actually way worse than that. It's a very specific con called a rug pull. And this is now like 99.9% of crypto use cases. It's like either this or it's running a drug cartel is what you use crypto for. These are everywhere, the Trump family is deep in them and Silicon Valley is really deep in them. Like Mark Andreessen, the guy that we talked about

the other week, he's really, really deep into these schemes. There are billions of dollars flowing into these and they're gonna be more and more of them because Trump is lifting the regulations on them, which is why I'm glad we're talking about them. So, okay, I'm gonna try to explain this pretty quickly. So Trump woke up one morning and said there are a billion Trump coins, on them, which is why I'm glad we're talking about them. So, okay, I'm going to try to explain this pretty quickly. So Trump woke up one morning and said there are a billion Trump coins, which of course

have no actual inherent value, made them up out of thin air. And that he said, and this is going to become important, he is only going to sell a partial fraction of them. He's only going to sell a fifth. Right, I believe he owns 80%. He owns 80%, yes. So okay, he sells those Trump coins off for a couple of dollars each, not very much. Probably a lot of those initial buyers are Trump fans, are people who just say, okay, he sells those Trump coins off for a couple of dollars each, not very much. Probably a lot of those initial buyers are Trump fans, are people who just say like,

sure, I'll get $50 worth because I love Trump and I want to show my support for him. Those coins are so cheap, they get snapped up very quickly. There's more demand for the coins than there is supply, which is by design. So they get bid up from, you know, $5 a coin to $7 a coin. And this gets noticed by a much larger pool of people, which is where the real money is, which is what actually drives these schemes. These are crypto speculators.

These are the people who notice the price going up. They don't care about Trump. They just think, I want to ride this high, buy low, sell high. They're formally called, you know, retail investors, day traders, but they're not what you might picture when you hear that phrase. These are not like stockbrokers. These are people who, I mean, the association have are like people who go to the racetrack.

And I don't mean that derogatorily, like it's a lot of compulsive gamblers, it's a lot of get rich people, and it's a lot of people who have debt. It's a lot of people who have credit card debt, they have medical debt, they're desperate. So they put up their life savings, they put up their Christmas bonus, unemployment checks, stimulus checks were a big driver of this a few years ago. So that all of that bidding drives the price up even more. And the Silicon Valley playbook at this point is to bump up the price of that coin even more by hyping it through their network of like podcasts and influencers.

There's so many media networks that just do this now. The Haktua podcast, that's all that was. It was a pump and dump meme coin scheme. That was the whole thing. Wow, I didn't know that. Right, exactly. They've gotten really good at it. I thought it went away just because Haktua couldn't cut it.

It went away because she completed. Run out of topics or guests. The entire podcast was to launch and then pump up a meme coin. She did a rug pull, which I'll explain in a second, and then she disappeared because she had completed the scam. Trump, of course, is president, so he doesn't need a podcast network. He can do a lot to drive up the price by calling attention to it by saying, look, the price is going up.

And the thing to keep in mind is none of this in and of itself enriches Trump, because this is all of this trading going on separately from him among all these speculators are trying to get rich. Once the price gets high enough, it's time for the rug pull, which is remember Trump has held on to 80% of these coins. He's got literally hundreds of millions of these coins. So the rug pull is when Trump sells all of those coins off. So if the market price when he decides to do this is a hundred dollars a coin, the first few he sells off for a hundred, then he runs out of

people willing to buy at that price, so he starts selling it at ninety dollars a coin, then at eighty dollars a coin. What happens is that once he has sold all of his off, the price is at zero. And what that means is that if you are one of those speculators, those day traders, someone who put up your life savings because you've got medical debt and you're desperate to try to pay it off, that value is now wiped out to zero. You've gone because the coins are now worthless

because Trump has dumped his supply to make a bunch of money, made millions of dollars, and then driven the price down. And this is- Why would anyone ever buy a meme coin? So it's funny if you- Isn't everyone who owns the meme coin gonna do a rug pull at some point?

Yes, and the hope is that it's like, maybe I'll be the one who sells right before the rug pull. And it's like kind of funny- But yeah, you're looking to buy low and then it gets high and free like, okay, it's not the rug pull yet, so I'm gonna sell. Right, right. And the vast majority of people will get rug pulled.

And when you read interviews with regulators who are talking about this, it's like kind of funny and kind of dark when they're like, look, if people wanna do something stupid with their money, there's only so much we can do to stop them, even though we think there should be more regulation stopping people from running these

outright fraudulent schemes. Yeah, yeah, you can go to a casino too. I mean, casinos are much safer because you can't do it from your fucking phone. Yeah, that's true can go to a casino too, you know. I mean, casinos are much safer because you can't do it from your fucking phone. Yeah, that's true. You're limited by your own person and this is the whole shift to online gambling why it's so dangerous because people gamble away

their life savings without ever getting up out of their couch because it's designed to be addictive. Anyway, sorry, I've got a whole thing on this. But the point is this is the Silicon Valley business model now is these coins. Anyway, quick ad before we finish this. Offline is launching a meme coin. model now is these coins. Anyway, quick ad before we finish this. Offline is launching a meme coin.

Get the offline meme coin now. Go to Coinbase. Dollar sign offline. Kidding. Please, please, no. Yeah, it's pretty fucked. I know. It's pretty fucked.

I would like to hear the argument from the crypto folks who are very much against this and thinks, because there were quotes like, people think that we're scammers and fraudsters and this makes people believe that more and we're not. And I would love to hear the argument from them on why what they believe crypto should be for is different than the meme coin. I know it used to be it was all about the blockchain and security and nobody thinks that now, nobody makes that case anymore. Okay, well maybe we'll have someone on at some point

to make the case. Who knows? All right, one last story before we go, the Supreme Court seems likely to rule in favor of a Texas law that requires users to verify their age by submitting a government issued ID or another form of age verification in order to access porn sites.

Since 2023, similar laws have passed in 19 states, including both blue and red states, and are intended to prevent minors from accessing sensitive content online. The porn industry challenged the Texas law, arguing that the age verification requirements violate the First Amendment rights of adults to access explicit content and, quote, open the door to an emerging wave of regulations that imperil free speech online. We shouldn't expect a ruling until the Supreme Court term ends this summer, but a majority of the court seemed willing to rule in favor, at least narrowly, of the Texas law. Max, you have a take on this that is anti-porn?

Not only anti-porn, I'm with Alito on this that is anti-porn? Not only anti-porn, I'm with Alito on this one. What? Samuel Alito and me, two peas in a pod. Why are you taking our porn away, Max? Okay, so a lot of states have laws ordering social media companies, in addition to porn sites, not to let kids use their platforms.

Now, I think it's fair to say we here at Offline are very much in favor of these laws because social media is catastrophically demonstrably harmful to kids in ways that emotionally and socially stunt them, like maybe for life and in ways that lead to a more atomized, lonelier and less progressive society. So it's good to get kids off of social media, but these laws have very little effect because there's no teeth to them, or even when they do have an enforcement privilege to them, social medias don't have any enforcement

besides asking users to tick a box to say I'm under 18. So they kind of throw up their hands and they say, well, there's no way for us to verify for sure whether or not it's a kid or an adult using this app. And of course, social media companies don't want to enforce those bans because kids are a huge and super important part of the market because you got to hook them young. So let's say the Supreme Court upholds this Texas law, which mirrors all these other state

laws all around the country. The points industry strategy up to this point has been to just shut down in places that require age verification and try to create pressure, put pressure on lawmakers, make people unhappy about it. Like TikTok shutting itself down. Exactly. Like TikTok shutting itself down. If the law gets affirmed, the porn industry is going to say, okay, we're going to have to actually find a way to verify people's ages. And I think what you will see them do at this point is that they will do what the social media industry has refused to do, which is just set up a secure third-party real ID verification service, some sort

of service that checks your ID once to see that you are 18 or above, and then you use that service to log into, you know, Pornhub or ptape.com, whatever website you want to use. But here's the thing, once that service is set up and it's a secure third party service that the porn industry could, they could fund in a second, it's very easy to do, then it becomes a very- Is it, I get, I think that's the big question is, can you give people the confidence that if they have their government issued ID, which your name and all your information,

and you give that to the porn industry, that they're not going to be like, you know, now we're in a MAGA surveillance state. They're not going to be like, hey, check out what Max is looking at. So part of the key is it has to be a third party service that looks nice and it's not the porn hub ID verification service,

it's realid.com or whatever. I think something to keep in mind here is that if that sounds scary, just consider how many websites and apps you use today that have your fucking credit card number, that have your bank information. You don't think that's not attached to your ID and your name. And I mean, they could just, honestly, they could use that.

They could use just like enter your credit card number and we'll use that to verify your ID. Maybe if you don't hold up your driver's license, that feels a scary to people. But we have all of these services like Plaid that are just third party, they verify your credit card. And then you use that in these other sites so you're not trusting every random website

and the internet. So extending that into an ID, it feels scary because it's different, but I think it is in fact so much less invasive than something we're already totally used to. Well, yeah, I was gonna say it's like it's 2025. The idea that we can't figure out a way to like safely and securely verify age and like maintain people's privacy, but also verify the age is fucking crazy.

And we in fact already have there are there's not a ton of them, but it's like I had, you know, when I was in the UK, I had to set up this like insurance thing and they do the same thing. You hold up your ID to your laptop and it gets sent to a data center somewhere in the world and they just look at the ID and they type in above 18. And then you could look at all the porn you wanted in the UK.

And I'm so much porn. Pornhub.uk Alright, I think you made a good case. Thank you. I also agree with the ban on the UK. And I'm so much porn. Pornhub.uk. Alright, I think you made a good case. Thank you. I also agree with the ban on the merits. But that could be for a different time. That is for a different time. I do not feel qualified to talk about that.

Because you've never seen pornography before? Because I've never watched pornography? That's true. You keep it very chaste. You know, it's tough. I know I have children. I don't want them to be, you know, when they get their Now I have children. I don't want them to be, you know, when they get their phones.

I mean, I don't want them to have their fucking phones anyway. It's a whole other thing. That's right, yes. I'm banning all the phones. We're moving to the woods. That's right. All right, before we jump to the Derek Thompson interview,

quick housekeeping. The next four years are gonna be a lot. This first week was a lot. But we will be here to help you through it all with honest analysis on what's happening, what we can do to push back against everything, all the craziness that we're about to deal with, that we're already dealing with in the next four years. You can help support our media ecosystem, the progressive media ecosystem by subscribing

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After the break max talks to Derek Thompson about the anti-social century Offline is brought to you by mint mobile 2025 is here and mint mobile has a resolution for you. Skip the gym, skip the fad diet, skip the BS resolutions you'll forget about by next month. Instead, make a resolution to save some serious cash by making the switch to Mint Mobile. And right now, you can get half off their three-month unlimited plan. Cricket Media staff members, Raven and Nina, recently made the switch to Mint Mobile.

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service for 15 bucks a month. Switch to Mint and new customers can get half off an unlimited plan until February 2nd to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free. Go to MintMobile.com slash offline. That's MintMobile.com slash offline. $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional tax fees and restrictions apply. See MintM Mobile for details. We are back. Joining me is Derek Thompson.

Derek is the host of the podcast Plain English, as well as a staff writer at The Atlantic, where we worked together a very long time ago and where he's just published a sweeping and excellent cover story, The Antisocial Century, about our increasingly isolated lives, how all that alone time is changing us. Derek, it's great to see you, man. It is great to see you. Hey. Here we are, not isolating socially.

I am so excited to talk to you about this because it feels to me like we are having kind of a like moment right now culturally in recognizing that so many of the ways the world is changing trace back to this one thing to increase social isolation. It feels to me a lot like a similar moment we had eight years ago recognizing the role of social media for the first time in reshaping our world. That was something that hit me in 2017 reporting in Myanmar and seeing the extent of social media's influence on the ground in a way that I just like did not think was possible, completely refrained my thinking about it, made me really want to dig deeper on it.

So I'm wondering if there was a similar kind of moment for you, if there was a trigger like a news story, something that you saw that made you want to spend so many months looking into the role of social isolation. That's a great question. No one's actually asked me that question exactly that way before. And as I reflect, the truth is I didn't have any one moment where my eyes were suddenly opened. What it felt more like was the accumulation of a weight, like year after year, recognizing that people around me and even myself were making choices to socially isolate when we didn't have to.

And then early in 2024, I was coming off of a book leave and book leaves are incredibly socially isolating by nature. It was co-writing the book with New York Times' Ezra Klein, but to actually write a book is a very socially isolating thing. You literally can't write a book is a very socially isolating thing. You literally can't write a sentence with someone else. So you have to hole yourself up alone at home and write those paragraphs.

And as I was coming back to the Atlantic, rolling back on the staff writer work, I was spending a lot of time with the American Time You Survey, which is a government survey that is administered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and just discovered while I was fooling around with it that the amount of time that Americans spend in face-to-face socializing had declined to the lowest rate ever, certainly in the last 20 years of the American Time Use Survey,

but also quite clearly going back decades before this most recent version of the survey existed. And I thought, you know, when people are trying to make like a social criticism, when they're trying to say, you know, Americans are more anxious than ever, they're sadder than ever, or they're more ex than ever, we often don't have like a really, really clear data point. But here, I was looking at a government report

saying that Americans had never spent so much time alone and had never spent so little time in face-to-face socializing. And I thought, okay, I love social mysteries, I love sociological mysteries. Here I have like a dead body, so to speak. And now I can be a detective and ask around and figure out who murdered the body of American socializing. And that's really what kicked off about a year of reporting on for this piece. It's so funny. I also had a big trigger moment with that exact same data set

when I saw that there was a moment in 2014 where for the first time we started spending more time on social media apps that we did in-person socializing. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics is doing a lot of radicalizing people without anybody knowing about it. And it does speak to the fact that you make this point during the piece

that we think of like, oh, the pandemic, the pandemic, but this is a trend that was accelerated by the pandemic, but really predates it in a lot of ways. Let me rattle off some of the stats from your piece that are truly staggering. In the last 20 years, in person socializing has declined 20%. And it has declined 35% among unmarried men and people younger than age 25. The amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events has dropped a third in the same period, as has the share of US adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night. Men spend seven hours, I could not believe this, in front of the TV for every one hour they spend hanging out with someone outside of their home. And then of course there are so many horrifying stats about kids. You present this puzzle in your piece about this trend and some of these stats that of course all that

isolation is making us less happy, less able to cope with the world, our social isolation is increasing. But yet even as we become more alone, we report feeling less lonely. You cite that the share of Americans who describe feeling loneliness, a lot of the previous day dropped by a third between 2023 and 2021. What explains that, do you think? I think this is one of the most interesting mysteries

in the piece, and I'm not sure that I have the answer to it, but I do have a strong theory. I think that people need to grapple with something that's typically not grappled with when we look at this subject, which is that Americans are spending an historic amount of time alone, but loneliness is not increasing at anything like the rates of aloneness. In fact, in many cases, people who are spending more time alone say they're not feeling more lonely at all. And that's really weird when you think about it, until I had a conversation with a sociologist

at NYU, Eric Klinenberg, who pointed out that, you know, loneliness is not aloneness. For many people, one night's aloneness, one night's solitude, a moment of quietude, can be a balm for the soul. I mean, some of the most relaxing moments of my life are drinking a glass of wine alone at a hotel bar, like watching a baseball game, and maybe just like having a nice steak in front of me. Like that can be really, really beautiful.

Loneliness is a felt gap between the social connection you have and the social connection you want. And it should typically be the thing that forces you to get up off the couch and go hang out with people when you've been spending a lot of time alone. But what I think is really interesting is how many young people in particular do not seem to feel that impulse.

As I was reporting for this piece, my wife pointed out a trend on TikTok that is sometimes called cancelation. That is the elation of friends canceling plans on you. And in this trend, you see young people dancing, sometimes in very funny and goofy ways, to the revelation that their plans on a Friday or Saturday night have been canceled.

So what are we looking at here? We're looking at the most socially isolated generation in recorded history, turning on their phones and celebrating with a dance when hangouts are canceled. That's not a phenomenon of loneliness. That is something else. And that's why I call this the anti-social century rather than the lonely century. This is a century where we are choosing self-isolation, often because of convenience, often because of stress,

often because of overwhelm about entertainment in our environments. We are choosing social isolation rather than feeling the natural, healthy biological impulse of loneliness and getting up off the couch. Why do you think we're choosing that when we know it's bad for us? I don't think we know that it's bad for us.

I think that people are, people are complicated. And many of our behaviors are best described as a kind of tension between two opposing forces. We know that we shouldn't have that second slice of cake, but it tastes so damn good. There's a thinking piece of us that knows that we should be healthy

and a dopaminergic or dopamine seeking piece of us that wants that extra piece of cake. There's a part of us that knows we should go to the gym today, but also just kind of feels tired and doesn't want to. On the one hand, we're trying to preserve our feelings and our sense of safety, and on the other hand, we know that we should be healthy. I think that we know that we're social animals.

And there's a part of us deep down where if someone administered a survey and they said, is hanging out with friends good for you? Is hanging out with family good for you? Is spending time with other people outside of your home good for you? We'd say, yes, Yes. Yes, how boring But in the actual, you know warp and wefts of life

We're also novelty seeking creatures and we're dopamine seeking creatures and we're comfort seeking creatures And where can we find novelty and entertainment at home and where can we find dopamine on our phones and where can we find comfort? Within our four walls. And so it's not so simple as, well, we know that being with people is good for us. Yes, we know that being with people is good for us. And I think we might have some psychological biases around socializing that we can talk about. But I think fundamentally what we're looking at here

are the costs of convenience, a kind of convenience curse. We built a world of wonders with more entertainment in our living rooms than anyone in the 1950s could possibly dream. We built a world where you can have entertainment in our living rooms than anyone in the 1950s could possibly dream We built a world where you can have almost anything delivered to your front door if you have the resources for it Whether it's you know a thing of toothpaste or dinner or you know cookies at 1 a.m In the morning we live in a world of extraordinary convenience But the wages of convenience the costs of convenience are that we don't actually have to leave our house

that often, and as a result, a lot of us don't. According to Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey, the average American spends 99 more minutes in their home than they did 20 years ago. So this is, I think, about a convenience curse that has caused people to kind of forget that we're social animals made better by being around people.

Well, I wonder if an effect of all that convenes is that we might not even realize how many of us are choosing social isolation. It might be the kind of thing where we think social isolation, that's something that happens to other people, that happens to the people who are really in crisis, that's just for edge cases. And sure, I might get door dash occasionally, maybe I don't make as many plans as I used to, but I'm not socially isolated in a way that is actually harming me.

And there's a theory that you talk about in your piece that I feel like might help speak to how so many of us could be choosing social isolation to a degree that is having this level of consequence in effect without realizing it, which is this idea of the middle ring, the idea that our kind of social world has an inner ring, which is the people in our immediate, like our immediate family, the people who we live with, our outer ring that is kind of the broader, you know, our political community, the people who are associations work we might be a part of, but that middle ring has fallen away.

And it was so striking to me because I think that might be true for so many people, maybe even for myself, without us realizing it. So can you talk about who is in that middle ring and what are the consequences of losing that? Yes, you're referring to a conversation that I had with Mark Dunkleman, which is probably the part of the essay that I saw most commented on, for better or for worse. And Mark Dunkleman, really, really an author and researcher at Brown University, when I called him, he said, you know, ironically, Derek,

this sort of age of convenience and digital entertainment, in this, there's actually some relationships that we have in this time that are closer than ever. You know, like, I'm texting my wife all day long, he said. When my daughter buys a Butterfinger at CVS, I get a notification. So there's a way in which that inner ring, so to speak, of family is more tightly communicative than it's ever been.

You say, now imagine the opposite, a kind of outer ring of people that share an interest or affinity. So I, this is him talking, he's a Cincinnati Bengals fan. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where there are like 17 Cincinnati Bengals fans, but he can be on group chats and like look on Twitter and actually talk to the local beat reporters, the local NFL beat reporters, and feel like he's having conversations with people

who are Cincinnati Bengals fans all across the country, even all over the world. It was totally impossible to imagine 30 years ago. So you have this inner ring of family that's gotten more intimate, and you have this outer ring of tribe that's also concretized in the digital age. But there's a middle ring, he said, and that middle ring is the village. It's the people we live around, it's the people who are our neighbors,

it's the people who we might disagree with and we're not related to them. And if the middle ring, he says, teaches us love, and the outer ring teaches us loyalty or ideology, it's the middle ring that teaches us tolerance. It is naturally tolerating to learn how to get along with people who are not your sister or brother or parent who disagree with you about major things. You learn how to compromise. You learn how to see the fact that people who disagree with you share your same values sometimes and that they're messy and complex individuals. And, you know, as thinking about how that observation maps onto our political system,

I thought, you know, Donald Trump is in many ways an avatar of this all-tribe, no-village style of politics, where there's no minutes, no square inch for tolerance. It's all about out-group animosity, all about giving the other side no quarter. And unfortunately, that brand of politics is self-evidently very popular in this country. And I do think that its popularity has something to do

with the way that we live. And I would just make one more point, because this actually didn't end up in the piece. It was cut in edits because it was a little bit thinly developed, but I think it's very interesting. Arlie Russell-Hawkschild, who's a sociologist out in California, has written several wonderful books about the right in America.

Just published a book, I believe, called Stolen Valor. We were emailing for this piece, and I said, you know, what do you think about my thesis? Did you see anything that might connect to it? And she said, when she was doing some of her ethnography work in rural Kentucky, she would visit these people in their smaller homes.

And many times the television said it would be the largest piece of furniture in these small homes. And these people were absolutely animated by the migrant crisis. They were absolutely furious. And one of the most important issues to them was the rise of illegal immigration.

But if you look at census reports, one of the places in America with the smallest share of immigrants, legal or undocumented, is rural Kentucky. So rather than a world in which all politics is local and they're voting based on the interest they see when they're hanging out with their neighbors, instead, all politics, you could say, is focal. It's about whatever national news media is being

broadcast through their screens. That is the tribe eclipsing the village in American politics. That is really interesting. And it makes me think a lot about this debate we had over the last year about economic attitudes, like the so-called vibe session. And like, why do so many people in surveys say, my personal economic situation is improving and is doing better than it was, but the economy as a whole is a disaster. And I feel like this could go a long way to explain that, that I'm not, I'm no longer as the average American refracting my social experience, which is how I understand reality through the people in my community who probably have a similar experience to mine.

I'm refracting it through my media environment, which is maybe giving me a somewhat distorted or filtered view depending on what that media environment is. Yeah, I'm fascinated by this particular discussion, the vibe session discussion, and, you know, I haven't quite reached the bottom of a personal conclusion on it. I think that vibes are are really, really important part of how people respond to some of these consumer sentiment surveys, especially when they're asked about a really big question,

like how's the US economy? In a way, I think there was an essay that was just published by the substacker and social psychologist, Adam Mastriani, the thesis of which is that in many cases, people are confronted with difficult questions and they substitute easy questions. So for example, like, you know, like a silly example would be like, what kind of balm should I use when my back hurts?

That's a very difficult question because you would have to do a bunch of randomized testing. What kind of balm does Shaquille O'Neal advertise on television? It's a very easy question to answer because you just saw the Icy Hot advertisement, so you buy the Icy Hot. And in the same way, I think in these questions, that might have seemed like a very weird detour, but the same way in these questions about consumer sentiment on the economy, I think people are asked what is fundamentally a very difficult question. What is the US economy up to these days?

Who the F knows? What's the economy up to? The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a number and the Bureau of Economic Analysis has a number and there's a bunch of different numbers you can throw into the number pot. But fundamentally, you're answering a much simpler question, which is, do you like the person sitting in the Oval Office? That's a very easy question to answer. And so what ends up happening is that all the Republicans say they hate the economy

when Joe Biden's the president and all the Democrats say they hate the economy when Donald Trump is the president. And you get a ton of ideological contamination in these questions about national economics. Offline is brought to you by Armra Colostrum. It's January, the time of New Year's resolutions. Everyone's looking for ways to be healthier and stave off winter illnesses. Give your immunity and gut health their best chance with Armra Colostrum. Discover the transformational health benefits of Armra Colostrum that have earned tens of

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me so much because I feel like it does a lot to explain how someone can feel like they have a lot of social contact throughout their day. Like you mentioned, you're texting your partner all day and then you log on and you're on your sports team, fandom group chat, your fantasy football group chat. And so you feel like you have social interaction, but you end up feeling the symptoms of social isolation because you are missing this really important part of your socialization diet. It really makes me think about where nutrition science used to be, you know, 20, 30 years ago and how much it has changed just in our lifetimes.

And it used to be kind of as simple as, you know, the number of calories you're getting in the day. And now, of course, we have an understanding that there are many different kinds of calories that you can get, that the, you know, the amount of processing in the food is something that we're just coming to understand the significance of. So if something as simple as the food you eat is something that has taken us this long to understand that it's not just the amount, but it's the kind and it's the quality, I wonder if we are going to look back in five or 10 years and have a level of understanding

that there are kinds of isolation, kinds of socializing that we needed our kind of socialization diet that maybe we just don't have that granularity of understanding now. Yeah, one of the people who's doing a lot of really interesting work here is quoted in the piece and I interviewed him on my podcast Plain English the week that the piece came out. His name is Nick Epley. So he's a psychologist at the University of Chicago.

And he's done a lot of work showing that there's a number of expectations gaps that we have when it comes to socializing. One expectations gap is that many people, especially introverts, but including extroverts, tend to assume that people around them don't want to talk to them. And so we withhold conversation in public spaces. We're afraid essentially of being judged or being slightly rejected or other people just sort of like sloughing us off. And it turns out that a lot of human interaction is governed by principle of reciprocity.

If you're nice to people around you, they tend to be nice to you. If you tell a joke or offer a compliment, people tend to smile or say thank you. But we don't perceive that principle of reciprocity because there's a certain anxiety and a certain avoidance that we have about connecting with other people around us. The other expectations gap that he's pointed to that I think is really important and powerful is that we are afraid of having deep conversations, especially with people who we feel like we don't know

really, really well and have deep intimacy with. But in fact, he's done lots of studies suggesting that you bring people together, whether it's people in a business school on their first day or random people who are signed up for an assignment or for an experiment. And if you assign them to a group where they have to ask each other really deep questions about their lives, they have incredibly positive experiences talking about the meaning of their life. And to be honest, I think one reason why you see the rise of counseling and therapy in this country, and look, my wife is a clinical psychologist, so I'm certainly not against

the rise of business for my household. But I think one of the reasons is a you know, a counselor or a therapist, a clinical psychologist, a psychiatrist, these are people paid to listen to us. These are people paid to have deep conversations with us. And in a world where Nick Apley is right, and Americans are for a variety of reasons, withholding deep conversation with each other, there's a way in which we're like pinching the hose of deep conversation. And that water needs to go somewhere. And there's a feeling that we have of, there's something I need to tell the world. There's something I need to tell another person that I don't have the opportunity to tell someone.

So they end up telling their therapist. Look, that's fine. Having a great relationship with your therapist can be a good thing. But it speaks to the demand. It speaks to the fact that people love having deep conversations with each other, even though we withhold them all the time. So, you know, in terms of thinking about a kind of, you know, equating sociality to like, you know, nutrition or fitness, there's, there is a term that Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz, um, at the Harvard study of development

called social fitness. And I've thought sometimes after writing this piece, like, does America need an equivalent of a kind of like social fitness guide, right? The equivalent of like a guide to being socially fit, the same way that there are any thousand number of podcasts for, you know, working out your deltoids and, you know, getting a six pack. Where is that similar guide to being socially fit? I think this is, I think there's a vacuum here that demands to be filled.

Yeah, it is kind of wild that there are so many wellness podcasts now that teach you, and often give good advice, how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize your exercise. I was just listening to one talking about how to optimize your focus, but none of them ever seem to talk about it, at least that I have heard. I'm sure someone is doing it. But I see very little talking about just how to optimize for social connections. And I don't quite understand why that seems to be a blind spot in our culture, that either it's not something that we collectively recognize as important as it is, or maybe there's just not space in the culture because it doesn't fit into kind of prevailing gender norms,

that that's something that we're supposed to be emphasizing, but it's very strange given how deep of a human need that is. I think it's much worse than you say. I think it's not just that there are podcasts about how to get ripped and how to focus that aren't also about how to optimize social connection. It's that these podcasts and these viral, you know, morning videos often present the perfect life as a life that's about optimizing the individual in the absence of other people. Like if you see some of these

like perfect morning routine videos, and I talk about this in the essay, you'll often see this incredibly handsome, rich looking man in a beautifully well lit space, and he wakes up with an eye mask, and he takes it off, and he journals, and he has a very green looking breakfast, and there's a sauna, and there's a cold plunge, and there's a sauna and there's a cold plunge

and there's meditation and there's the sit-ups and there's all of this self optimizing and there's no people, there's not even the faintest hint of a partner or a child or a friend who is staying in the guest room. Like these visions of a life perfectly lived, optimally lived, have been utterly scrubbed of any kind of social connection. Yeah, it's wild.

So I think it's not just that podcasts about optimal gut health should also talk about the importance of deep conversations. I think they should. It's that I think a lot of the people, and I suppose especially young men, who are listening to these podcasts have a conception of the optimized life as being a kind of monkish existence where you scrub your life of any possible distraction, and distractions happen to involve other people. I totally agree. That part of your piece, when I started to

realize that you see it everywhere, you see that like monk-like, solitary ideal everywhere, and I really think that we are going to look back on that in 20 years, and we're going to see these videos of people by themselves in their apartment, and it's going to look to us then the way it looks today to see someone smoking a pack of cigarettes. I really think we're going to look back on that as like not just unhealthy behavior, but like shockingly unhealthy behavior. And it'll be like watching Mad Men, it'll be like, I can't believe they used to cherish that as an ideal.

And that's what I mean when it feels like we are at the start of a big moment of kind of realizing just how important this is, how pervasive the effects are. Is there anything that you have changed in your own habits, socializing your kind of day-to-day practice as a result of the things you learned working on this piece. Yeah, Nick Epley has a lovely thing that he inspired in me where he pointed out that if you talk to someone on a train and one of his experiments was forcing people to talk to strangers in a train, which strikes a lot of people probably listening, it's a horrifying experiment, but actually found that people who struck up conversations with strangers in trains said they had a

significantly more positive 15 minutes than those that remained quiet. He said that didn't change anybody's depression, that didn't cure anybody's generalized anxiety disorder. It just marginally improved their experience of that 15 minutes of life. But life is just one 15 minute experience after another. That's all it is. And the way that I've thought about changing my life and the way that I have changed my life

while reporting and after reporting the piece is I've just filled more of the gaps in life with social connection. I work from home, the Atlantic is based in DC and I live in North Carolina, so I work from home quite a bit. I'm walking downstairs to make my second cup of coffee and sometimes I'll think, I should, you know,

I'll pull up Twitter or I'll pull up email. I can always just text a friend. I could always just contribute to a group chat. I could always just do something that is contributing to a person I know in the physical world who means something to me, rather than participating in the invisible horde. And I think those little changes can accumulate in a really big way.

Yeah. Can I tell you a couple changes that I've made in what I hope will be a year of making a lot of changes to try to socialize more? One is that I, last year I briefly experimented with using a flip phone for a while instead of a smartphone, which is both great and terrible. I could not do it sustain at long term. But something that I noticed is that so many times I would go to open my phone to do the bullshit you do on your phone. And because I couldn't, instead I would call somebody out of the blue, which is something

I never did before. Or I would text somebody and because you're on T9 and it takes forever to text, the text would just be, can you meet up for coffee or for a drink for an hour? Which again, is that kind of like small amount of socializing that like, it's been since college, since I did that a lot. And I started to do that more and it was amazing. And then I went back to a smartphone and of course

I'm back to my old bullshit. But I have found since then that reducing just my amount of screen time as basic as it is, even though I don't think of screen time on my phone as one for one with socializing, because you know, screen time is interstitial, socializing is in big blocks, I do find if I spend an hour per day less on my phone, I end up socializing more with people.

Are you on your phone less at all these days? Absolutely, my phone is significantly less. And I try to track weekly averages of screen time to make sure that number is consistently falling down. Okay. I think it's, this is a disease whose cure is free and widely known. People understand what it is to hang out with a friend. I think it is slyly important, or subtly important I should say,

to schedule socializing into our lives. To think about this, to think about social fitness maybe even as an awkward equivalent to actual fitness. A lot of people say, I'm going to go to the gym at 4 p.m. or 8 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That's what I'm going to do. If I don't schedule know, I'm going to go to the gym at 4pm or 8am every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That's what I'm going to do. If I don't schedule it, I'm not going to do it, is something that you'll hear people say about working out. It's certainly what I say about working out. What about the same about social fitness? What about the

idea that like a week spent where you don't see someone on Thursday or Friday is not a week well spent, right? That that is a week where you've forgotten to do legs, so to speak. I think that, I think it'd be useful actually to think of life this way, even if it strikes people initially as a little cheesy, it strikes them as cheesy because it's uncomfortable. But fundamentally, I think deep down we recognize and the science is pretty clear on this,

that social fitness is akin, very akin to fitness itself. If we schedule weights and we schedule aerobics, why not schedule dinner? Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's so much research showing the physiological benefits of increased socializing. So I would say even if you need to think of it as a form of physical fitness, like you know what?

That is true too, exercising, doing leg day for your brain. Yeah, right, yeah, leg day for your brain. I just want to tell my personal trainer, you know, we're going to have shoulders day, we're going to have leg day, we're going to have martini day, and martini day is where I do not go to the gym and rather go to the bar next door.

That does sound pretty good. I mean, when you put it that way, it's a wonder we're not doing that. Well, Derek Thompson, it's been a pleasure. Great to see you, man. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. The show is produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illich-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor.

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