Is the internet slowly breaking our brains, and if so, what can we do about it? Offline with Jon Favreau is a different kind of Sunday show. A place where you can take a break from doom-scrolling and tune in to smarter, lighter conversations about the impact of technology & the internet on our collective culture. Intimate interviews between Pod Save America host Jon Favreau and notable guests like Stephen Colbert, Hasan Piker, ContraPoints, Margaret Atwood, and Megan Rapinoe spark curiosity and introspection around the various ways our extremely online existence shapes everything from the ways we live, work, and interact with one another. Together we’ll figure out how to live happier, healthier lives, both on and offline. New episodes drop every Sunday morning, wherever you get your podcasts.
But Right. If he is, you know, maybe some of the boomers aren't so much, going down rabbit holes on Facebook. Or it's just it's a slightly less toxic rabbit hole That's yeah. So we'll and and then young people who he's not doing as well with Right. Yeah. For various reasons. Right? Like, we've talked about Gaza, but there's also a whole host of other reasons. And, again, people who are not paying as close attention to the news tend to be younger, tend to be people who are more lower information. Right. So interesting. Alright. In other news, Americans are sick of swiping. That's according to Laura Kelly at the Atlantic who argues that the era of the dating app is coming to an end. She knows that Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble are finally seeing a decline in users and that young singles are fed up with online dating. Apparently, Gen z is now gravitating towards old fashioned ways of meeting people in person. Just just to let people know you were doing air quotes. I was doing air quotes through friends, speed dating, and matchmaking, and that the dating apps' new subscription services have made finding people online far more difficult for young people with less disposable income. I did like, there's another Atlantic piece about this about the return of the meet cute, and, like, people like Gen z is, like, looking to, like, meet up again. And some of the apps, the dating apps, are now trying to reverse the whole thing so that they are sponsoring, like, in person meetups. They've they've tried this occasionally for years that'll be like, go to the Hinge local, and I don't they think it's not. I don't think it's working well. Idea. Yeah. Alright. So I missed the dating apps era because I met Emily in DC at a bar. In 1902? In that 2011. 2011. Oh, okay. But I have seen a lot of friends use them to great success and great frustration. Mhmm. Are they really that bad? So I joined the dating apps for the first time in 2011. Mhmm. And I was trying to do the math of how much time I spent on them. It was off and on probably like 6 years, maybe. So a lot. And I honestly think they are not so bad in and of themselves. I think a lot of people's complaints about the dating apps are really complaints they have about dating because those things have become
Think we're gonna go one phone on the trip. Wow. Yeah. I think because you don't need Are you gonna do it so that, like, if we use the phone, we both have to be there to the phone because otherwise, like, what Julie's just gonna be, like, using the phone, like, with but she's by herself. She'll be, like, I'm gonna go take a walk with the phone. Good luck. Well, you know what? If she does, then I am off the phone. That's good. That's true. Yeah. So if you're just the agent, like, I mean, we'll see what happens, you know. But relationships are all about keeping score. That's true. That's true. And I don't know. Fucking man. I'm John Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. So, we skip talking about the news last week because my conversation with Aitan Hirsch about political hobbyism went long, by the way, go check it out if you have that. Interesting. Really cool. So this week, we're gonna cover a few stories that caught our eye, and take some of your questions. We're gonna talk about whether the current iteration of AI is a bunch of junk, or awesome because of an AI rapper named glor. It's both. It turns out. We're also gonna take a look at a new study that suggests the only thing that's keeping us on social media is FOMO. Boy, do I have some thoughts on this one? I do too. I I figured you might. But first, The stock price of the Trump Media And Technology Group, the new holding company of Truth Social, is in free fall. Yeah. You need to see it. Man, I took a bath on this way, John. I went long on trump media, and I am dying. Boy. Boy, are you regretting? To step out and call my broker again. So after hitting a high of $79 a share on March 26th. Nuts. That's too that's too much. It's too much. For for a not a real company. Right? The company's stock has plunged by more than 50% slashing the worth of Trump's stake by more than $3,000,000,000 in less than 2 weeks and knocking the former president out of Bloomberg's list of 500 wealthiest people What's it gonna do now? Start another media company, probably. The stock's initial inflated value, $6,700,000,000 for a company that reported
Work, how do the rules affect outcomes, all that, and it's it's just like that. You know? It's like people change the law. We see how the law affects, behavior or out policy outcomes, whatever, and then all around me, friends, family, students, like, everyone was spending, particularly in that lead up and after the 2016 election, just excessive amounts of time on politics, but no goal, no strategy, no connection to, like, how a bill becomes a law or how do different people get elected. And so I felt like there it just made sense to write a book about civic engagement where we try to understand both the phenomenon that a lot of people are engaged in, hobbyism, and, like, what the alternative is, which is doing politics. So I can hear a lot of people, who may be listening to this saying, you know, politics isn't a hobby or a game to me. You know? Sure sure I'm posting up a storm while I'm listening to Pod Save America and and watching Maddow, but I have deeply held political beliefs. I care very much about who gets elected. I stay informed. I vote. I donate. Maybe I've been to events and, and some protests. Is that not real political engagement? Like, some of it is and some of it isn't. Right? I mean, is it strategic? Do you have a goal in mind, and is the thing that you are doing advancing the goal or not? You know? So, like, donating is kind of an interesting thing. Some donating is super strategic, even low dollar, like, donating. I I I am always impressed when I see groups of people who don't have a lot of money and they wanna pull together, you know, a $100 each and think really thoughtfully about which candidate both conveys our values and for whom this money will be meaningful. Okay. That is a strategic activity. Mhmm. But sitting on your butt with your phone watching, like, a dumb video of a candidate who is not in a close election and then feeling like that makes me happy. Let me give that person $5. Now I feel like we
That I heard that I saw from the ACLU on this is, you know, it infringes on kids' freedom to speak or find information. Now I'm not sure what information you can find on social media that you can't find on the Internet Yeah. Except for, the opinions of complete fucking idiots. Yeah. That's actually that's talking me into it. If what we're gonna do is funnel kids from learning on TikTok to learning on Wikipedia, what an incredible net positive for humanity and for those kids. I just don't buy the, like, oh, they can't find there's certain information they're not gonna be able to find if they can't be on social media. Because it's not an Internet ban. It's a social media ban. And then freedom to speak. You know, kids can speak to anyone they'd like in real life. Again, on email, over text, if you wanna give your kids a phone, over email. Like, I don't know that you I don't know. I mean, like, the courts, like I said, there was an injunction on, similar laws, that federal judges put an injunction on the law in, I think it was Arkansas, maybe Utah, Montana. It's like going through the system. Right. So they're they they haven't fared as well in court, and I think it's because of some free speech concerns. But I go back to we've talked about before. You know, it's freedom of speech is different than freedom of reach. Right? Like, you have you should be able to communicate to anyone you want, but, like, you don't have a right to, amplify that speech to millions of followers or thousands of followers or hundreds of followers. That's just that that's a new thing. I also think that I think that this is an area where I am both sympathetic to the concern, but also think that it is way more solvable than we're treating it as. Like, when I think it was the Montana ban went into effect, I read there was this really good story that talked to a lot of kids who were really worried about this because it was, like, you know, gay kids or trans kids in small conservative towns where they're, like, I don't have anyone who I can talk to around me in my community. My community is very feels very hostile. I need these online spaces because there's some way where I
That Americans are lonelier than ever. So what do you think is going on? Because I guess, intuitively, for me, I'm like, you know what? We're all locked up in our homes for for a couple years. Yeah. And we sort of lost this sense of connection with each other. So to me, that explains not just loneliness, but a lot of the other issues. But what what did you find? Okay. So first of all, I I I hear you that we were locked up for a while, and and we we did transform our lives, but I think it's so important in this conversation for us to remember that we did not actually get locked up in our homes. Like, I have relatives in France. I have friends in China. I have friends who are in, you know, Melbourne in Australia. They were actually locked up. Yeah. Like That's right. Italy. The people all over the world were literally locked up, and they were disconnected. They couldn't leave their apartments. Like, they could come out for for 30 minutes if they had a pass to go in this neighborhood. Like, that did not happen in America. It's so important to note that. Like, our our version of shutting things down was pretty mild, and it's so interesting because all these other countries had far more severe disruptions to regular social life and social interaction, but they did not have the outrageous spike in violence. Right? Not just gun crimes. Like, you know, they clearly didn't have people brawling the aisles of supermarkets over masks, but we had this, like, spike in reckless driving. You know, all these kind of strange ways in which we acted out on each other that just don't, you know, work with the idea that there was something especially severe here in the US. So so in my book, I interviewed lots of people who were living alone in in New York at, like, the peak of the crisis. It was so interesting, John. Like, what what they kept saying to me is it's not like I felt lonely in the regular sense of the word. You know? I was living through this thing with all kinds of other people who are living through it too. Like, we're we're in sync in a weird way. And they were saying also, like and I don't know if you did this, but, like, they were on the phone talking to their
