Trump's TikTok Dilemma, Crypto Cons Debunked, and The Truth About the Loneliness Epidemic

Summary

Offline with Jon Favreau – Episode Summary: "Trump's TikTok Dilemma, Crypto Cons Debunked, and The Truth About the Loneliness Epidemic"

Release Date: January 26, 2025

In this engaging episode of Offline with Jon Favreau, hosted by Jon Favreau and Max Fisher from Crooked Media, the hosts delve deep into three pivotal topics shaping our digital and social landscapes: Donald Trump's intricate dance with TikTok, the pervasive scams within the cryptocurrency realm, and the burgeoning loneliness epidemic in America. Skipping the usual advertisements and non-content segments, the episode offers a comprehensive exploration of these issues, enriched with insightful discussions and notable quotes from guests like Derek Thompson.

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1. Trump's TikTok Dilemma

The episode kicks off with a heated discussion about former President Donald Trump's attempts to ban TikTok in the United States. The debate intensified when TikTok was temporarily taken offline as part of a nationwide ban, only to be swiftly reinstated following Trump's announcement to delay the enforcement of the ban ([05:08]).

Key Points:

• Banning and Reinstatement: The ban was initially enforced, leading to TikTok displaying a message that it was shut down due to a new law. However, just 14 hours later, an executive order was announced to extend the ban period, resulting in TikTok restoring its services ([05:08]-[07:21]).

• Negotiations and Potential Deals: Discussions revolved around potential buyers for TikTok, including Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, with Trump hinting at approving partial ownership stakes. This move has raised eyebrows regarding TikTok's alignment with both Trump and the Chinese government ([07:21]-[09:04]).

• Manipulation Concerns: Derek Thompson critically highlighted TikTok's strategy to manipulate its user base to please political figures, questioning the platform's reliability and bias ([06:57]-[08:45]).

Notable Quotes:

• Derek Thompson ([05:24]): "TikTok pretended to be shut down for a day to gin up this big win for Trump as this quid pro quo."

• Derek Thompson ([06:36]): "TikTok has made clear, has said to its, all of its users, we will manipulate you to please these two power brokers because we have to."

• Jon Favreau ([09:04]): "I feel bad for the people who make a living on TikTok if there was a ban."

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2. Crypto Cons Debunked

Transitioning from social media manipulations, the hosts shed light on the murky waters of cryptocurrency scams, particularly focusing on the recent trend of meme coins initiated by high-profile figures like Donald Trump.

Key Points:

• Meme Coins and Rug Pulls: The discussion unraveled how meme coins, such as those launched by Trump and Melania, function as elaborate scams. These coins are artificially inflated through initial sales and hype, only for the creators to execute a "rug pull," crashing the prices and leaving investors in financial ruin ([19:39]-[31:31]).

• Systemic Issues in Crypto: Derek Thompson emphasized that these scams are prevalent in the crypto space due to minimal regulation, drawing parallels to online gambling's addictive nature ([28:26]-[30:37]).

• Impact on Investors: The deceptive nature of these schemes traps vulnerable investors, including those with significant debts, leading to devastating financial losses when the scammer sells off their shares at inflated prices before the collapse ([26:47]-[30:07]).

Notable Quotes:

• Derek Thompson ([25:34]): "These are crypto speculators... Once the price gets high enough, it's time for the rug pull, which is... nothing... driving the price down."

• Derek Thompson ([28:24]): "It's like, kind of funny and kind of dark when they're like, look, if people want to do something stupid with their money, there's only so much we can do to stop them."

• Jon Favreau ([30:51]): "Please, Please, No."

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3. The Truth About the Loneliness Epidemic

In the heart of the episode lies a profound interview with Derek Thompson, author of "The Antisocial Century." The conversation unpacks the paradox of increasing social isolation amidst decreasing reported feelings of loneliness.

Key Points:

• Decline in Face-to-Face Socializing: Utilizing data from the American Time Use Survey, Fisher and Thompson highlight a significant drop in in-person interactions over the past two decades, with a 20% decline among Americans and a staggering 35% reduction among unmarried men and individuals under 25 ([41:20]-[43:17]).

• Choosing Isolation Over Loneliness: Contrary to expectations, feelings of loneliness have decreased despite heightened isolation. This phenomenon is attributed to a deliberate choice to opt for self-isolation for reasons like convenience, stress, and the overwhelming availability of digital entertainment ([44:53]-[47:20]).

• Impact on Social Structures: The erosion of the "middle ring" – the neighborhood and community individuals interact with daily – has fostered a society less tolerant and more fragmented, leading to polarized political landscapes and reduced interpersonal tolerance ([50:51]-[54:31]).

• Strategies for Social Fitness: The discussion advocates for treating social interactions with the same importance as physical fitness, suggesting scheduled social activities as a remedy to the convenience-driven isolation epidemic ([63:56]-[66:35]).

Notable Quotes:

• Max Fisher ([47:20]): "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."

• Derek Thompson ([54:31]): "The middle ring, the idea that our kind of social world has an inner ring... the middle ring teaches us tolerance."

• Max Fisher ([66:35]): "There's a vacuum here that demands to be filled."

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Concluding Thoughts

Throughout the episode, Favreau and Fisher navigate through complex issues with clarity and depth, providing listeners with a nuanced understanding of how digital platforms and societal shifts are reshaping human interactions and trust. The episode not only critiques current trends but also offers pathways towards healthier, more connected lives both online and offline.

Listeners are encouraged to engage with these topics critically, recognizing the subtle ways in which convenience and digital manipulation can influence personal and collective well-being.

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Notable Quotes Summary:

• Derek Thompson:

  • "[05:24] ...TikTok pretended to be shut down for a day to gin up this big win for Trump as this quid pro quo."
  • "[06:36] TikTok has made clear, we will manipulate you to please these two power brokers because we have to."
  • "[25:34] These are crypto speculators... Once the price gets high enough, it's time for the rug pull."
  • "[28:24] It's like, kind of funny and kind of dark when they're like, look, if people want to do something stupid with their money, there's only so much we can do to stop them."
  • "[54:31] The middle ring teaches us tolerance."

• Max Fisher:

  • "[47:20] We're looking at the most socially isolated generation in recorded history turning on their phones..."
  • "[66:35] There's a vacuum here that demands to be filled."

• Jon Favreau:

  • "[09:04] I feel bad for the people who make a living on TikTok if there was a ban."
  • "[30:51] Please, Please, No."

---

This summary captures the essence of the episode, providing a detailed yet concise overview of the critical discussions and insights shared by the hosts and their guest, Derek Thompson. For those seeking to understand the intricate dynamics between technology, politics, and social behavior, this episode serves as an enlightening resource.

Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

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[Max Fisher]

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.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau.

[Derek Thompson]

I'm Max Fisher.

[Jon Favreau]

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 Antisocial Century. Sounds very offline. What'd Derek have to say?

[Derek Thompson]

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 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 it gave me a lot to chew on.

[Jon Favreau]

I have had that piece that. 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 it.

[Derek Thompson]

It's good. It' zippy read and it says it's not. I was worried it was going to be what I thought it was going to say, but it surprised me.

[Jon Favreau]

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.

[Derek Thompson]

They're all buddies up there.

[Jon Favreau]

And a Supreme Court case about pornography that may have some unintended positive consequences for the way young people use social media.

[Derek Thompson]

I got a hot take for.

[Jon Favreau]

You have to convince me on that.

[Derek Thompson]

Oh, gee, you got it. You gotta hang out for the hot take because it gets contrarian.

[Jon Favreau]

All right, but first, TikTok. It's back. It's back from the dead. It is back for now.

[Derek Thompson]

What did you do in the 18 hour TikTok outage? How did you cope?

[Jon Favreau]

See, I'm not a, you know, I'm not addicted to TikTok. Yeah, I never did it for me.

[Derek Thompson]

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.

[Jon Favreau]

I don't know why. I, you know, and it's, 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'm like, that's all.

[Derek Thompson]

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.

[Jon Favreau]

I 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 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 going to happen?

[Derek Thompson]

So we should talk a little bit about this, like, gambit that TikTok and Trump like set off on jointly. It is even worse than it looks because TikTok shutdown was completely self imposed. Yeah. Biden said he's not going to enforce the shutdown. Trump said he was.

[Jon Favreau]

Which on its own is, by the way, pretty weird.

[Derek Thompson]

It is. It was a weird choice.

[Jon Favreau]

The law that I signed, I'm not going to enforce. We're going to, we're going to throw this in Trump's lap.

[Derek Thompson]

I know.

[Jon Favreau]

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.

[Derek Thompson]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Which is what they did.

[Derek Thompson]

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, signaled 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?

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Do you want your brain pickled by the CCP or do you want it pickled by the MAGA folks?

[Derek Thompson]

This. They're in hockey.

[Max Fisher]

Both.

[Derek Thompson]

It's both. TikTok you were. That's the only platform that is so openly and hawk to both Trump and to the Chinese government. And TikTok has made clear, has said to its, all of its users, we will manipulate you to please these two power brokers because we have to.

[Jon Favreau]

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.

[Derek Thompson]

I know, I know. I 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. For a political quid pro quo with a corrupt Trump, like, should really tell you something.

[Jon Favreau]

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 sail like US Government ownership. Is that what we're. It's not clear what he meant. Right.

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah. And it's also he seems to think that ByteDance is supposed pay him for the sale. It's Naito's funding all over again.

[Jon Favreau]

Also, it seems like Beijing for the first time is now open to potentially allowing a sale.

[Derek Thompson]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

Of ByteDance or a partial sale. A partial sale, which is new.

[Derek Thompson]

I know.

[Jon Favreau]

Which I did not, I did not think was going to happen is worrying.

[Derek Thompson]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

But. But as you pointed out when you're talking about this before, this was after a call between Trump and Xi.

[Derek Thompson]

Yes. So who knows what happened in the culture.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Derek Thompson]

This is almost like what worries me more than the ban itself and the fact of Tik Tok 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?

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it also seems like Trump and TikTok users are now in violent agreement because Trump was like, well, data privacy concerns. Like, what? 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, yeah, no, we don't. We're right.

[Derek Thompson]

I know.

[Jon Favreau]

So the kids want the data, their data to go to China. Trump wants their data to go to China. Just. That's it.

[Derek Thompson]

What is. 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?

[Jon Favreau]

I was told that TikTok is showing me the kind of on the ground journalism that is not. No one else does in the world.

[Derek Thompson]

So it's just TikTok someone sent me.

[Jon Favreau]

I can't, 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, yeah. And then after we talk about it, I go. And it happens on our discord too, because I always. I love our Discord users. People get very mad at. They think that we're very snarky about this, that we're snide about it and I don't be smart. But, like, there are people who make a living on TikTok. And I think for those people, that's who I feel the worst for, about if there was a ban, right. For the people who are like, I'm just watching videos and I deserve.

[Derek Thompson]

Sure, great.

[Jon Favreau]

I get it. I get that some of 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.

[Derek Thompson]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

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. And I think if you're getting your news from TikTok, it's a problem.

[Derek Thompson]

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 TikTok voted for Trump. People who get their news from the newspaper, like 80% of them voted for Kamala Harris.

[Jon Favreau]

I think a lot of people, too. Some of the same people are like, well, I get. I get my news from TikTok 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, right, is problematic. And 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.

[Derek Thompson]

Which is so much worse, which is.

[Jon Favreau]

Now controlled now, but it now is a MAGA CCP joint venture.

[Derek Thompson]

Right? So I, 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 use by half of the country. And that this is a humiliating loss for Democrats who have lost zoomers for a generation. And I like, I think that we are all getting social media into thinking that the TikTok ban was super unpopular and that Gen z really wanted TikTok saved 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 issue.

[Jon Favreau]

Is that the most recent polling? Because I know the polling has changed since the ban.

[Derek Thompson]

So that is. That is the most recent Pew poll, which is the big shift of the. The number used to be even smaller.

[Jon Favreau]

Okay.

[Derek Thompson]

For the people who oppose the ban, this is the big jump up. It's now it's up to 28%.

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, it was lower before.

[Derek Thompson]

It was even lower. Yes. And it's slightly more than that. 32% support the ban. And the 28% number, that is half the share of people who 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. That's not very popular.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I mean, I guess among Gen.

[Derek Thompson]

Z, I'm sure it's higher than 28%. Yeah. 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, reality distorted by social media. Because who are the people who are angriest about TikTok getting taken away? Social media super users. So we say, oh, well, look at how unpopular this is.

[Jon Favreau]

But it's not going to be the loudest voice.

[Derek Thompson]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

Voices. And 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. 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, right? Boom. Now you're political.

[Derek Thompson]

I 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. 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. And I think some people who think that, like, this app is really fudgeing harmful for me or for my kids or someone I care about, you know, it could be, 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.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it sounds like they're going to get it. They're going to get it saved. I mean, I'm, I am having. Anything could happen, obviously.

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

It's 2025.

[Derek Thompson]

Right, right, right. The law isn't real anymore.

[Jon Favreau]

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. It appears that the law, and we've talked about this before, the law gives the President a lot of authority, Right. To determine whether the divestiture is sufficient.

[Derek Thompson]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

And so you can see some shuffling around of ownership and whether it's Musk or Larry Ellison or some consortium or Trump, whatever else. Right. And then Trump being like, okay, we're good.

[Derek Thompson]

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.

[Jon Favreau]

Look, we can't do worse than anyone in the Trump administration.

[Derek Thompson]

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. 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.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Derek Thompson]

Because Apple is so worried about legal exposure. If you want a fucking iPhone with TikTok on it, you have to buy it on ebay for a few thousand dollars.

[Jon Favreau]

Really?

[Derek Thompson]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

Wow. Someone should start collecting those. That's a real.

[Derek Thompson]

Well, you've got one. Because you're the only person who's not addicted to the app.

[Jon Favreau]

My. My iPhones. IPhones with TikToks on them just became. TikTok just became pretty valuable.

[Derek Thompson]

It did, yes. So 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 going to gamble $50 billion on this being within the law, and that is a pretty high bargain.

[Jon Favreau]

And hope that the courts.

[Derek Thompson]

Hope that the courts want to do it. But Trump won't change his mind.

[Jon Favreau]

It's also tough, though, to find someone with standing to sue over this.

[Derek Thompson]

I was wondering about that too. Like, who is the. Is. Is it Zuckerberg who is injured. Right.

[Jon Favreau]

By someone. By a qualified divestiture. That. Someone who's gonna say that wasn't qualified enough? Like, who's the injured party there?

[Derek Thompson]

That's the only thing I would be. It's. Well, we haven't gotten into this yet in our legal close readings of the law, but that all.

[Jon Favreau]

Stay tuned.

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah, stay tuned.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Jon Favreau]

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.

[Derek Thompson]

Is it the cabinet?

[Jon Favreau]

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 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.

[Derek Thompson]

Yes. Boy, is he pissed about.

[Jon Favreau]

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?

[Derek Thompson]

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, Open AI, 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 make use land, not to mention energy, not to mention water, not to mention all of our limited resources that they can finally make. So that will somehow push a over the line and it will become something useful and profitable.

[Jon Favreau]

Can I become like a NIMBY on for data centers? For AI data centers? Yeah, beyond housing, NIMBY on the AI data centers. That's where I am.

[Derek Thompson]

I, I say convert all of the data centers into mixed use. Walkable Urbanism. That's my, 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.

[Jon Favreau]

Elon Musk was very unhappy with all of this. Love to see that. He said this is fake. They don't have the money. 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.

[Derek Thompson]

Yes, Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, 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.

[Jon Favreau]

Or maybe he's not. Maybe he's just having a good time.

[Derek Thompson]

And anti defamation training. Sorry, just kicked in.

[Jon Favreau]

Austin's sweating over there in the corner.

[Derek Thompson]

Everybody's crying in the studio.

[Jon Favreau]

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. Resistance figure, you know, in fact, on. On the Pod Save America. That is out Friday. Today, as we're recording it, Dan Pfeiffer was talking about how he, he was in a meeting about stopping Trump with Sam 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 did, he had like a poll, he did a Twitter poll once. He's like, what should we call Donald Trump? Dangerous Donald. It was just like the worst resistance shit. And so now after, 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, that's not an untrue statement. He will be. He will be incredible for the country in many ways. I don't know, like, what kind of connotation.

[Derek Thompson]

Boy, this is like looking at Melania and the I'm so over it jacket all over again.

[Jon Favreau]

What's going on with Sam Altman? I mean, look, what is the NPC trap?

[Derek Thompson]

So this is, this is a trope in Silicon Valley that says npc, which is a video game.

[Jon Favreau]

I know that that's like non player.

[Derek Thompson]

You're just like. Yeah, that. You're just like following the herd. And everyone else said that Trump is bad. But then I thought for myself and I realized, wow, this guy who is lifting all the regulations on my company and giving me maybe $500 billion, it turns out he's good, actually.

[Jon Favreau]

We all have, we all have tds, right? We have Trump Derangement syndrome. So it's like the NBC trap.

[Max Fisher]

Got it.

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, look, this is obviously an arc that we have seen. Like not every major Silicon Valley figure. There are some holdouts.

[Jon Favreau]

Far too many.

[Derek Thompson]

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, I really do think that this is ultimately an economic story that is larger than any one 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 it in the Internet era. It was always built on zero interest, on zero, 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.

[Jon Favreau]

And as you saw this week, I don't know if you saw this, Trump said interest rates must go down.

[Derek Thompson]

Yes. He's very, very adamant about which.

[Jon Favreau]

That's, that'll do it.

[Derek Thompson]

Right. Which is going to be great for Silicon Valley.

[Jon Favreau]

You mentioned the, the crypto schemes. You know, Trump. In the lead up to the inauguration, Trump and Melania launched a pair of meme coins.

[Derek Thompson]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

AKA shit coins.

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah. And the guy who did the sermon at the inauguration launched a meme coin.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, he got. Yeah, he got.

[Derek Thompson]

Everybody's getting in on it.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. He got his beak wet too. Which immediately skyrocketed in value netting the Trumps, at least on paper, billions of dollars.

[Derek Thompson]

Although this since halved, I was going to say.

[Jon Favreau]

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.

[Derek Thompson]

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 of 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. Are billions of dollars flowing into these, and they're going to 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 going to try to explain this, like, 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.

[Jon Favreau]

He owns 80%.

[Derek Thompson]

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, 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, 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 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 hock to a podcast, that's all that was. It was a pump and dump meme coin scheme. That was the whole thing.

[Jon Favreau]

Wow, I didn't know that.

[Derek Thompson]

Right, exactly. They're really. They've gotten.

[Jon Favreau]

I thought it Went away just because.

[Derek Thompson]

It went away, because she completed run.

[Jon Favreau]

Out of topics or guests.

[Derek Thompson]

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 $100 a coin, the first few he sells off for 100, then he runs out of people who are willing to buy at that price. So he starts selling it at $90 a coin, then at $80 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.

[Jon Favreau]

Why would anyone ever buy a meme coin?

[Derek Thompson]

So it's funny if you.

[Jon Favreau]

Isn't everyone who owns the meme coin going to do a rug pull at some point?

[Derek Thompson]

Yes. And the. 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.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, you're looking for to buy low, and then it gets high enough, you're like, okay, it's not the rug pull yet. So I'm gon.

[Derek Thompson]

Right, right. And the vast majority of people will get rug pulled. But. And when you. 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 want to 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, like, outright fraudulent schemes.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, yeah, you can go to a casino too, you know.

[Derek Thompson]

I mean, casinos are much safer because you can't do it from your fucking phone.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, that's true.

[Derek Thompson]

You're limited by your person. And this is the whole shift to online gambling why it's so dangerous because people gamble away their life saving things 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.

[Jon Favreau]

Anyway, quick ad before we finish this. Offline is launching a meme coin. Get the offline meme coin now.

[Derek Thompson]

Go to. Go to Coinbase. Dollar sign offline.

[Jon Favreau]

Kidding.

[Derek Thompson]

Please, Please, No.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, it's pretty. It's pretty fucked.

[Derek Thompson]

It's pretty fucked.

[Jon Favreau]

I would like to hear the argument from the. 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 coins.

[Derek Thompson]

I know it used to be. It was all about the blockchain and security, and nobody. Nobody thinks that now. Nobody makes that case anymore.

[Jon Favreau]

Okay, well, maybe we'll. 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 be. 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.

[Derek Thompson]

Not only anti porn. I'm with. I'm with Alito on this one.

[Max Fisher]

What?

[Derek Thompson]

Samuel Alito and me. Two peas in a pod.

[Jon Favreau]

Why are you taking our porn away, Max?

[Derek Thompson]

Okay, 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 that 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 gotta hook em young. So let's say the Supreme Court upholds this Texas law which mirrors all these other state laws all around the country. The porn industry strategy up to this point has been to just shut down in places that require age verification to try to create pressure, put pressure on lawmakers, make people 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. Very easy to do. Then it becomes, I get, I think.

[Jon Favreau]

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, now we're in a MAGA surveillance state. They're not going to be like, hey look what look, check out what Max is looking at.

[Derek Thompson]

So part of the, part of the key is it has to be a third party service that looks nice and it's not the Pornhub verification service. It's realid.com or whatever.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Derek Thompson]

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.

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, I know.

[Derek Thompson]

That have your bank information.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Derek Thompson]

You don't think that's, 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 as scary to people. But we have there 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 on the Internet. So porting, 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.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, and yeah, I was going to say it's like it's 2025. The idea that we can't figure out a way to safely and securely verify its aids and like maintain people's privacy, but also verify the age is fucking crazy.

[Derek Thompson]

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.

[Jon Favreau]

And then you could look at all the porn you wanted in the UK.

[Derek Thompson]

And so much porn. Pornhub uk.

[Jon Favreau]

All right. I think you made a good case.

[Derek Thompson]

Thank you. I also agree with the ban on the merits, but that could be for a different time.

[Jon Favreau]

That is for a different time. I do not feel qualified to talk about that.

[Derek Thompson]

Because you've never seen pornography before?

[Jon Favreau]

Because I've never watched pornography.

[Derek Thompson]

That's true. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, we'll look at it now. You know, it's tough now. I have children. I don't want them to be, you know, when they get their phones and I mean, I don't want them to have their fucking phones anyway. This is a whole other thing.

[Derek Thompson]

That's right. Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

I'M banning all the phones.

[Derek Thompson]

Move into the woods.

[Jon Favreau]

That's right. All right, before we jump to the Derek Thompson interview, Quick Housekeeping. The next four years are going to 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 to Friends of the Pod. You'll get exclusive content and ad free episodes of Pod Save America and Pod Save the World World, which you can now access by subscribing directly through the Apple Podcast app. Just tap the subscribe button in your Apple Podcast app to start your seven day free trial. And please make sure you're supporting Vote Save America over the next couple months. VSA is creating spaces for you to recharge, find community and take steps to protect those at risk in 2025. Go to votesaveamerica.com and sign up for their email list to learn more. This message has been paid for by Votes Save America. You can learn [e-mail] and this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. After the break, Max talks to Derek Thompson about the antisocial 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. Raven says the wireless connection has been stellar while he's on the go, Nina is beyond thrilled about how much money she saved compared to her old plan on one of the big wireless companies. It's time to leave your overpriced wireless plans jaw dropping monthly bills, unexpected overages and all their other BS. In 2024, Mint Mobile is dropping huge savings for the new year by offering any three month plan for only 15 bucks a month. Even their unlimited plan. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can even bring your current phone and your number. Ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile. It's so easy. Sign up online and get three months of premium wireless 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 offline that's mintmobile.com 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 Mint Mobile for details.

[Derek Thompson]

This podcast is supported by Comedy Central's Emmy Award winning series the Daily Show. Jon Stewart and the Daily show news team are kicking off 2025 with brand new episodes covering a brand new administration.

[Jon Favreau]

And a not quite brand new president.

[Derek Thompson]

While it may feel like we've all been here before, it's never been covered like this. With Jon Stewart behind the desk kicking off every week, Comedy Central's the Daily show new weeknights at 11 on Comedy Central and streaming next day on Paramount.

[Jon Favreau]

Plus.

[Derek Thompson]

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 work together a 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.

[Max Fisher]

It is great to see you.

[Derek Thompson]

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 reframed 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.

[Max Fisher]

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. I 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 sentence with someone else. 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 to staff writer work, I was spending a lot of time with the American Time Use Survey, which is a government survey that is administered by the BUR 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 X 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.

[Derek Thompson]

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 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 adult having dinner or drinks with friends. On any given nights, 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?

[Max Fisher]

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 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. 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 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. And that's why I call this the antisocial 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 in getting up off the couch.

[Derek Thompson]

Why do you think we're choosing that when we know it's bad for us?

[Max Fisher]

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? 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 warp and weft 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 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 1am 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.

[Derek Thompson]

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. Like, it might be the kind of thing where we think social isolation, that's something that happens to other people, that happens to, like, the people who are really in crisis. That's just for edge cases. And, like, sure, I might get doordash 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 and 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 that 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?

[Max Fisher]

Yes. You're referring to a conversation that I had with Mark Dunkelman, which is probably the part of the essay that I saw most commented on, For Better or for Worse. And Mark Dunkelman, really, really, an author and researcher at Brown. When I called him, he said, you know, ironically, Derek, this sort of age of convenience and digital entertainment, there's actually some relationships that we have in this time that are closer than ever. 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, he said. 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 who disagree with you share your same values sometimes and that they're messy and complex individuals. And as thinking about how that observation maps onto our political system, I thought Donald Trump is in many ways an avatar of this all tribe, no village style of politics where there's no minute, no square inch for tolerance. It's all about out group animosity, all about giving the other side no quarter. And unfortunately, you know, 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 Hochschild, 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 Valley and we were emailing for this piece. And I said, 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 set 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 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 interests 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.

[Derek Thompson]

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, 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.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, I'm fascinated by this particular discussion, the Vibe session discussion, and I haven't quite reached the bottom of a personal conclusion on it. I think that Vibes are a really, really important part of how people respond to some of these consumer sentimen 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 Mastroianni, 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 bomb 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 question, what is the US Economy up to these days? Who the f knows? Like what's the economy up to? Like the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a number and you know, 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.

[Derek Thompson]

Sure.

[Max Fisher]

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.

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[Max Fisher]

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's 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's 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 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 Epley is right and Americans are, for a variety of reasons, withholding deep conversation with each other. There's a way in which we're pinching the hose of deep conversation, and that water needs to go somewhere, we're like. 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. And 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 nutrition or fitness, there is a term that Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz at the Harvard Study of Development call social fitness. And I've thought sometimes after writing this piece, does America need an equivalent of a kind of social fitness guide? The equivalent of a guide to being socially fit? The same way that there are any thousand number of podcasts for working out your deltoids and getting a six pack. Where is that similar guide to being socially fit? I think there's a vacuum here that demands to be filled.

[Derek Thompson]

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, at least that I have heard. I'm sure someone is doing it, but I see very little talking about just, 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.

[Max Fisher]

I think it's much worse. 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 morning videos often present the perfect life as a life that's about optimizing the individual in the absence of other people. People. If you see some of these 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 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. These visions of a life perfectly lived, optimally lived, have been utterly scrubbed of any kind of social connection.

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah, that's right.

[Max Fisher]

So I think it's not just that podcasts about, you know, 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, 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.

[Derek Thompson]

I totally agree. That part of your piece, when I started to realize that you see it everywhere, you see that monk, like, solitary ideal everywhere. And I really think that we are gonna look back on that, on 20 years, and we're gonna see these videos of people by themselves in their apartment, and it's gonna look to us then the way it looks today to see someone smoking a pack of cigarettes. I really think we're gonna look back on that as, like, not just unhealthy behavior, but, but like shockingly unhealthy behavior. And it'll be like watching Mad Men and 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.

[Max Fisher]

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 as a horrifying experiment, but actually found that people who struck up conversations with strangers in trains said they had 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. 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. I. The Atlantic is based in D.C. 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, you know, sometimes I'll think I should, you know, I'll pull up, you know, Twitter or I'll pull up email. I could 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 horror. And I think those little changes can accumulate in a really big way.

[Derek Thompson]

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. Like, I could not do it, sustain it 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. 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. Yeah. Are you on your phone less at all these days?

[Max Fisher]

Absolutely. My phone's significantly less. And I try to track, you know, you know, weekly averages of screen time to make sure that that number is consistently falling. Okay. You know, I think it's. I think it's. It is. This is a disease whose cure is free and widely known. Like, 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. Right. To think about this, to think about social fitness, maybe even as an awkward equivalent to actual fitness. A lot of people say, you 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?

[Derek Thompson]

Right.

[Max Fisher]

That that is a week where you've forgotten to do legs, so to speak? 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?

[Derek Thompson]

Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's so much research showing the physiological benefits of increased socializing. So. 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.

[Max Fisher]

Yeah, right. Yeah, Leg day for your brain. I just want to tell my personal trainer, you know, we're going to have, you know, 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, but rather go to the bar next door.

[Derek Thompson]

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.

[Max Fisher]

Great to see you, man.

[Jon Favreau]

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 Kantor is our sound editor. Audio support from Charlotte Landis and Kyle Seglin. Delon Villanueva produces our videos each each week. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer and Adrienne Hill for production support. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Building a business may feel like a big jump, but on deck, small business loans can help keep you afloat with lines of credit up to $100,000 and.

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[Derek Thompson]

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