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The Honest Broker Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Jared Henderson
The Honest Broker features in-depth conversations with the leading thinkers and writers of our time. It is a partnership between host Jared Henderson and culture critic Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker, a newsletter covering arts, culture, and media. www.honest-broker.com
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- 3 weeks ago1h 17m
The New Counterculture
Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Ted Gioia. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Ted needs no introduction here—The Honest Broker is his newsletter, after all. But I want to tell you a little bit about how Ted and I started this project. I received a message on Substack last year, and when I saw it was from Ted, I assumed it was fake. But it turns out it was real, and Ted asked me if I wanted to get lunch. After talking for a few hours about books, Substack, and new media, Ted asked if I wanted to launch a podcast on The Honest Broker. His only rule: I needed to find the most interesting people as guests. Well, this meant that eventually I had to interview Ted. We sat down to talk about media consolidation, building alternative institutions, and human creativity. Below is a transcript of part of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.I know you’ll enjoy this.A CONVERSATION WITH TED GIOIAJARED: Ted Gioia, thank you for joining me.TED: Well, thank you for having me. This is something we’ve long awaited.JARED: I want to start off with a big question. I think it’s fair to say that we’re living in a time of it institutional collapse. We had these prestige institutions that we used to rely on: The New York Times, The New Yorker, academia. And people could rely on them to vet new writers, vet ideas, and movements, and they just did a lot of credibility building for us. It took a lot of the work out of our hands. I think we just don’t have that same trust in those institutions anymore, and people don’t rely on them in the same way anymore. And things are increasingly more decentralized. Now, part of me finds this really exciting because it means for people who operate outside of those systems—I think you and I would be two examples—it means there’s more opportunity. But it also raises the question of whether or not we need to start building new institutions.TED: Well, there’s been a great promise that the internet would open up everything to us. All of a sudden, if I’m a writer, a musician, a visual artist, a videographer, all of a sudden, I could reach my audience directly with the internet. And we thought this was going to lead to an enormous blossoming of culture where everyone had this freedom and a thousand flowers blossomed. But that hasn’t happened, really. And in fact, what you see is that the institutions have become more consolidated and stagnant over time. Let me give you a few figures. Right now, most of the movies made come out of four Hollywood studios. They control it. Most of the movie distribution into the home comes from just four streaming platforms. In fact, in many instances, it’s the same company doing the movie-making as the streaming. That was illegal until very recently. In 1948, the Supreme Court said that a movie studio could not own distribution. And that allowed a lot of freedom. After that, there was a real flourishing of indie movies in the United States and overseas. But now we’ve stagnated to the point where there are just four streaming platforms, four movie studios. In music, it’s even worse. There are just three companies that control most of the hit songs. If you look at publishing, five companies control 80% of the books out there. It’s just ridiculous. As these industries become more consolidated, they become more bureaucratic, they move more slowly, they’re more cautious. Yet we’re more dependent on them than ever before. Now, we’re lucky that we still have an opportunity with a counterculture—and I’ll talk about that later. But I think the first thing you see is that the institutions have killed themselves by this consolidation, swallowing up their competitors, and creating this monolithic culture that’s not good for anybody.JARED: And I think it creates a winner-takes-all mentality, where before you could have movies that did well, but they kind of fall within the middle of a normal distribution. And then you’d have some outliers that did really well, and then you’d have some that bombed. And I think that as things have become more decentralized, you have many more flops. They never get off the ground, or they can’t even get funding to begin with. And then you have these big winners that take everything and maybe that that group has grown a little bit, and then it’s the middle of the culture that s
- Apr 13, 20261h 15m
How to Be a Serious Reader
Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Henry Oliver.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Henry Oliver is the literary critic behind The Common Reader, a newsletter helping you make the most of your reading. He’s also a Research Fellow and Emerging Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I sat down with Henry to talk about literature, poetry, the relationship between reading and empathy, and how to develop your taste. Below is an extract of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page. A CONVERSATION WITH HENRY OLIVERJared: Henry Oliver, thank you for joining me.Henry: Thank you for having me.Jared: So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?Henry: That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine. The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.“The elite tier has kind of given up on being elites.”Jared: Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, Succession’s really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy. Henry: There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions. Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. It's all full of the ordinary TV tropes we're all used to from a million other things. I didn't think the dialogue was that good. And I also felt the story was just dragging and dragging and dragging. But I'm happy to say, okay, a lot of people know TV better than me, and they think it was amazing. And like, I can just be wrong about that.But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading.Jared: What were the conditions that sort of led to this Philistine supremacy? What changed?Henry: One thing I should say is there's still a lot of excellence. And I'm not saying that everything's gone bad. I'm saying there's this new segment in the culture, right? I think part of it is that it's very hard to make money writing about Shakespeare, writing about new novels, writing about whatever the NYRB is putting out. It's very hard to get an audience for that.How many New York Review of Books can there be? How big is their audience base ever going to be? No one is really pretending that we can hit a million subscribers if we just do these six things. It's not there, right? And so I think part of it is just to stay commercial and to stay relevant. We had TV, now we have social media—that's just where people are. I'm a
- Mar 16, 20261h 19m
Why Read the Classic Books?
Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series—also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Naomi Kanakia. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Naomi is a writer. She’s published four novels, and her next book, What’s So Great About the Great Books?, will be released in May by Princeton University Press. She also writes the wonderful Woman of Letters newsletter here on Substack, and she is working on a short story collection to be published by Random House. I had the pleasure of reading What’s So Great About the Great Books? last year, and here’s what I wrote for the blurb:If you've ever wanted to read the Great Books, or ever wondered why you should, this is the book for you. Personal, humorous, and intimate, What’s So Great About the Great Books? gives us a great gift: a grounded guide to the classics, and a new standard for introducing these books to modern readers.In our conversation, we covered a range of topics, including why she wanted to write about the Great Books, why she decided to read them in the first place, and her struggles (and occasional triumphs) in the publishing industry. Below are some highlights from our dialogue. For the full conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.Highlights from the Naomi Kanakia InterviewJared: Naomi Kanakia, thank you for joining me. Naomi: Thanks for having me. Jared: You’re writing a book about the classics, which will be published by Princeton University Press. Tell me a little bit about what made you want to dedicate a year or two of your life to writing a book about the classics?Naomi: When I first started wanting to seriously be a writer, I decided that I should read all these great books that people always talk about. I bought a book called The New Lifetime Reading Program, I typed out the list of books recommended by this volume, and I have now spent 15 years reading through many of these books.Then, four or five years ago, I started writing some essays online, and an editor from Princeton reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do a book. At the time, I was between agents and my career prospects seemed pretty dire, and I wanted to work.I really love books about reading classics. I really like the angry polemical books, like Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, but I do feel that there’s a lot of angry polemic in this space. I felt there was room for more measured opinions, because I do think there are serious critiques to be made of the concept of reading old books. I wanted to write a book that took those concerns seriously and also had a more conversational tone. Jared: What are some of those critiques that you have in mind that you want to respond to?Naomi: A lot of books about reading classics are defenses of the humanities, or the idea that you should think deeply and love nuance. And it’s like, nobody’s against those things. The real question is: why do you have to read Milton instead of reading a modern author? Are we really saying that these old books are the best books and no modern books are good? Really, it’s a defense of a specific canon of books, and I believe that list is good and that people should read those books. Generally, it’s easier to gravitate towards the contemporary, and you have to try a little bit harder to look at these older books. But there are two major concerns. One is that older books are more difficult and more inaccessible. The other major concern is that if you’re reading older books, there will be less diversity. Jared: And despite those criticisms, you’re making an argument that it’s worth reading these old books. Naomi: Yes.Jared: I assume for part of that project, you had to go back and reread a lot of books. Was that part of the research, or was it just drawing on what you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years?Naomi: This was mostly an excuse to mentally return to a lot of my touchstones. These older books have a sense of integrity. This project w
- Feb 12, 20261h 27m
The Philosopher of Games
Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with C. Thi Nguyen.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Nguyen is a former food writer who became a philosopher. He’s now an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, where he also teaches in the Division of Games. His first book, Games: Agency as Art, won the 2021 Book Prize from the American Philosophical Association. In January, Nguyen released The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. It’s an exploration of the philosophy of games and a critical examination of the detrimental effects of gamification and institutional metrics. (I wrote a review of The Score on my own Substack.) Jennifer Szalai described The Score in a review at The New York Times: “This may be the only book in existence that discusses the game of Twister, the ethics of Aristotle and the mechanics of bureaucracies.” Below are highlights from my interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.Highlights from the C. Thi Nguyen InterviewJared: Thi, thank you for joining me.Thi: I’m happy to be here.Jared: I want to start off with a big broad question: why are games fun?Thi: There are so many answers to that. I’ve given much more complicated answers, but maybe the dumbest answer is one of the deepest. Games are actually designed to be fun. Not all games, but a lot of the games we find fun are not accidents. It’s an ultra-careful fine-tuning process. Designing for fun is so delicate. If you just tweak a few little bits in the incentive structure or tweak a few little rules, the fun will fall out of things. People think fun is mysterious — it’s not for game designers. There are micro-issues of exactly how you pace the timing and exactly how you pace the rules that seem to emerge. A lot of people are most impressed by the game designs that are elaborate and complicated, but what a lot of game designers are most impressed by is a five-rule party game that’s fun, because that’s the hardest thing to build.I think it’s important to acknowledge that these things are designed objects that have been subject to brutal design cycles.Jared: If I’m playing games, I have two very different preferences. One of them is that I really like cozy games, like Stardew Valley. But then my other love is roguelikes, which are so frustrating. I played Slay the Spire last night, and I never made it to the last level. It was an intentionally frustrating experience, and I went to bed happy. I think that’s weird. The challenge is why you want to keep playing, and it makes it more satisfying. Thi: Roguelikes are probably the center of my video game universe. But when you asked about fun, I immediately thought about laughter, the social part of fun. In game design circles, ‘fun’ is used a little more technically, where they are talking about ‘fun games.’ I have the same experience as you that most of what I love is intensely, gruelingly difficult and mostly involves failure and pushing your way intensely to get tiny moments of success. I have a theory about why that is deeply enjoyable for us. In games, unlike ordinary life, you can seek exactly the balance of difficulty, frustration, skill, and success that suits you. That’s unlike the world, which says ‘Now you must work on this thing at this difficulty.’ The choice structure is that you get to choose whether you’re playing Stardew Valley or Slay the Spire, and that ability to adapt the challenge environment to you makes it much more possible to find the deliciousness wherever it may lie for you. Jared: This is probably related to our mutual love of rock climbing. Thi: Rock climbing taught me a lot. Climbing is what taught me to pay attention to my body and the way my body moves, and part of it was exactly the difficulty scale. It gave me feedback. Godfrey Devereaux, who is one of my favorite yoga writers, has thi
- Jan 7, 20261h 13m
This University Built an Honors College — and Then Destroyed It
Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m sharing my conversation with Jennifer Frey. Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Jennifer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. She is also a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. She earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012.She’s also a fierce proponent of liberal education. She brought that passion with her to the University of Tulsa, where she built a new honors college and served as the inaugural dean — until, after just two years, the administration cut its funding by 92%. When that happened, Jennifer responded in the New York Times, offering an ardent defense of the value of liberal education. In that piece, she wrote:When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for—and deserves.I knew I wanted to talk to Jennifer about these issues. She joined me here in Austin to discuss the story of Tulsa’s honors college, the many problems facing higher education in the United States, and the value of helping students craft intellectual friendships. Below are highlights from the interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.Jennifer’s family recently experienced a serious medical event, and her husband Chris had to be hospitalized. There is a donation page for her family as Chris recovers. Highlights from the Jennifer Frey InterviewJared: Jennifer Frey, thank you for joining me.Jennifer: Thanks for having me.Jared: Why don’t we start by just telling everybody the story of what happened at the University of Tulsa?Jennifer: I’m a philosopher, and prior to moving to Tulsa, I was at the University of South Carolina. In 2020, we were all on Twitter a lot, and I post a lot about higher ed. One day I posted about the University of Tulsa and how terrible it was because they had eliminated their philosophy department, which is happening at a lot of places, and there was an acceleration during COVID. You actually don’t need to have a financial calamity to just want to murder philosophy. You simply need to not value it.I checked my replies, and I got a reply from the president of the University of Tulsa that said, ‘Hey, Jen, we’re not that bad. You should come visit us.’ He followed up and said, ‘I probably agree with a lot of your criticisms. I’d love for you to come out.’ In November of 2021, I went to the University of Tulsa, and I gave a talk in which I criticized the university, but I also talked about why philosophy should always be at the center of a university. That was the first time in my life I got a standing ovation for a talk.It turns out the president had an ulterior motive. He wanted to start an honors college, which he said would be like a mini St. John’s College. Great books, liberal education. “We grew enrollment by 500%, and we were bringing 26% to 27% of freshman into honors….We were bringing in money, grants, and donors. Then it all ended.” Jared: For many people, building something like that is a dream.Jennifer: Yes. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. You should do that.’ Then he asked me to come lead it. I said no, but he was very persistent. Eventually, we agreed that I would help him build a college on paper. We worked together for about a year, and at the end of the year, I kind of fancied what I had come up with. Then he said, ‘I still need someone to run this college.’ I interviewed, and I was hired and decided to move the whole family halfway across the country to Oklahoma to start this new college. The transition to administration, and away from an intellectual life to a very practical life, was very difficult, but it was incredibly rewarding. But to make a long story short, it was really successful. We grew enrollment by 500%, and we were bringing 26% to 27% of freshman into honors. J
- Dec 5, 20251h 28m
Publishing Is Getting Smaller—and Maybe Better
Welcome to the latest installment of our interview series here at The Honest Broker—also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.Today, I’m excited to share my conversation with Ross Barkan.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Ross is a busy man. He is not only the writer behind Political Currents by Ross Barkan — he’s also a contributor to venues like New York Magazine, the author of the novels Glass Century and Colossus, and editor-in-chief of The Metropolitan Review. So naturally, I wanted to talk to Ross about writing and publishing. Once we started talking, we couldn’t stop. This interview is cut down from nearly three hours of continuous conversation. We discussed the state of publishing, the difficulty of launching a new culture review, America’s political and literary history, AI art, and the ways that platforms like Substack are changing how we write and what we can get away with. Below are highlights from the interview. For the rest of our conversation, check out the video at the top of the page.Highlights from the Ross Barkan InterviewJared: I was prepping for this interview, and I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, Alexander Sorondo. He asked if I was going to talk to you about politics or about literature and writing. I had to confess to him that I didn’t know you wrote about politics. I knew you exclusively from novels and things like The Metropolitan Review. Ross: I like politics, but my love lies with literature and culture, and I think that comes across on Substack. That’s why Substack’s been so great, because the literary world is very hard to penetrate. Media is hard, but there is a very straightforward way that I could tell someone to break in. Come up with an idea, look at what the publication publishes, find the editor’s email, pitch them. They might not respond, but you can always pitch again, and at some point they might respond. The media world still moves at a pretty quick pace, and even though it is very desiccated due to all these economic forces, there are still outlets out there. The literary world is still this very strange organism, and it really took Substack for me to have any kind of literary career or stature of any kind. Substack’s not perfect. I don’t want to turn into a Substack fanboy, but it is different. It has opened up so many pathways. You mentioned Alexander Sorondo. We published his 15,000-word profile of William Vollmann in The Metropolitan Review. This is a piece that he could not get published anywhere. And to me, that’s insane. Jared: I think I was the third reader of Alex’s novel, Cubafruit. He sent me a copy before it was released, and I read it, and I was like ‘This is great. I love it.’ He went through that whole slog. He had an agent who loved his novel. He was getting personalized rejections, and every rejection would be effusive with praise, and they would say “We don’t know where to place this.” He’s a writer who just doesn’t fit into an easy mold. There is no niche for him right now. He’s doing something interesting, and the current media environment doesn’t know where to place him, and so he had to just go find something on his own. Insofar as I’m ever a fan of a platform, it’s because it gives people an opportunity to do something cool.Ross: I was starting my career at the height of the 2010s digital upstarts. That was supposed to save writing and media, and it did not. And it’s fascinating to see with Substack that it has inculcated genuinely original writing. Sorondo, Naomi Kanakia, John Pistelli, Henry Begler, Sam Kriss. They write differently. That’s what’s so exciting. You don’t see that
- Nov 19, 202554 min
How Technology Tears Us Apart
The Honest Broker interview series continues with a very special guest, Nicholas Carr. He is the author of The Shallows, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, and more recently of Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. You can watch here or on our YouTube channel. You can also find The Honest Broker Podcast on your favorite podcasting platforms.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Our conversation covers Nicholas’s turn to ‘tech skepticism,’ the fact that books like The Shallows sell a lot of copies but don’t seem to slow the adoption of these technologies, the history of technologies of connection like radio, and much more.An edited transcript of highlights from our conversation can be found below. Highlights from the Nicholas Carr InterviewFor the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.Jared: As I looked over your career trajectory, it seems like you got to this tech skepticism fairly early. What was it that led you to this early skepticism of technology?Nicholas: I actually started writing about technology in 1999, which was the peak of the first dot-com boom. What’s going on with AI today is kind of similar to what was going on in 1999. I enjoyed computers and computer networks. But then very shortly thereafter, the whole dot-com bubble burst. A lot of people who had bought into the enthusiasm and invested their retirement savings in it lost their retirement savings. I think people are naturally enthusiastic and get naturally excited by new technologies because they’re cool and interesting. But this taught me that we need to be skeptical. And back in the early dot-com boom, people were focused only on the financial and the business side. Social bulletin boards and chat rooms and stuff were dismissed as childish. It turned out that the social effects ultimately have been the biggest change of all.Jared: I revisited The Shallows recently and thought, “Wow, Carr saw something that was going to happen.” And your book was a bestseller. But the rate of technological adoption has, if anything, increased. How do you keep going?Nicholas: I draw a distinction between people listening and people changing their behavior. Compared to when I started raising some of these concerns in 2005 or 2010, when The Shallows came out, people were were still in the grip of not only enthusiasm about the internet, but a kind of worship of Big Tech companies and their leaders. We saw them as kind of saviors that were bringing this unlimited amount of information to us. And if you look at attitudes since then, they’ve changed dramatically. I’ve never considered myself fundamentally an advocate or a crusader. I’ve seen myself as a critic, and it’s not my job to change how people live. That’s up to them.Jared: How has it changed the way that you interact with technology? Because as writers or people trying to get a message out, the internet is the option. I make YouTube videos, and some of them are very critical of what online entertainment can do to you. And of course, a common comment I’ll receive is, ‘Well, why are you on YouTube?’ And my answer is that’s where everyone is. You have to go where people are to tell them how bad things are.Nicholas: I started writing a blog back in 2005 and wrote it for almost twenty years and then switched to Substack. I’ve used the internet as a platform for personal expression for a long time, and I value it as that. On the other hand, I’m very sad that it’s eroding things like print media, because I think that’s actually a better medium to get things across. But as you say, you go to where the audience is as a writer. There’s another angle, which is that I’m writing mainly about technology, about things that I think are often having harmful effects, but I have to keep using them, because if I stop using them I’ll have nothing to write about. I have to keep researching, and researching means using the technology. So the sad fact is that even though I’m probably at this point hyper-aware of some of the negative consequences, I, too, have not really changed my behavior. I’d like to present myself as this paragon of somebody who’s figured out how to use technology productively and well, but unfortunately, I can’t do that. Jared: If you could spend decades thi
- Nov 4, 20251h 0m
Derek Thompson on the Anti-Social Century
Welcome to the third installment of our interview series here at The Honest Broker—also available on our new YouTube channel and Apple Podcasts. Today, I’m happy to share my conversation with Derek Thompson.Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).When Derek came to Substack, he said he wanted to focus on three issues:* The Abundance agenda, building on the bestselling book he’s published with Ezra Klein.* Science in a way that’s both curious and skeptical.* The anti-social century. (Derek published a great piece on the subject at The Atlantic in January.)I wanted to focus on that last issue in our conversation. This intersects with issues about which I care deeply: the loneliness epidemic, alienation driven by adoption of new technologies, and the impact of AI on our lives. You can find more of Derek’s work on his newsletter. Highlights from the Derek Thompson InterviewFor the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.Jared: Derek Thompson, thanks for joining us.Derek: It’s wonderful to be here.Jared: When you launched your newsletter, you had this nice sort of thesis statement. You said ‘I’m going to cover three topics.’ One was them was the Abundance agenda, the other was covering science in a way that’s both curious and skeptical. And then there was a third: the anti-social century. That one stuck out to me. How bad is it out there?Derek: I think many writers live with a kind of hypocrisy at the heart of their work. And I would say that my personal hypocrisy is that I’m mostly optimistic about science and technology, but I’m also pessimistic about the social changes that come with science and technology. And so in a weird way, I find myself often writing about how thrilled we should be about all sorts of advances in medical technology and biotech. I’m fascinated, by the way, with just GLP-1s and everything they seem to do. And at the same time, I find myself consistently drawn to the way that modernity changes habits and behaviors in ways I find often quite bad. I wrote this cover story for The Atlantic on the phenomenon that I called the anti-social century. And the antisocial century emerged really from one key statistic that I found in the American Time Use Survey. One of the things that they ask is, how much time do you spend socializing with other people in face-to-face communication? And the key statistic that I found is that the average amount of face-to-face socializing in this century has declined for all Americans by about 20% and for young Americans by about 40 to 50%. What I’m identifying here is the fact that in the 25 years since Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone there has been an antisocial quarter of a century. It touches the anxiety crisis that we see among young people. I think it changes our politics by alienating us from our neighbors. I think there are so many different tendrils that emerge from the phenomenon of the anti-social century. Jared: There’s a bit of an irony when you read Bowling Alone. He has a very optimistic chapter about the internet. When he’s writing around the year 2000, the internet is still new. And he’s like, oh, we’re going to form community networks. People are going to organize ways to go out together. They’re going to use the internet to have conversations with their neighbors.Derek: Oops!Jared: In a revised introduction to the second edition, he admits that he whiffed it. He was wrong. He thought it could maybe bring us together, especially if we created small, intentional, locally based communities. He was essentially imagining the Nextdoor app, which is of course a cesspit. No one thinks ‘Wow, I like my neighbors more because we interact on Nextdoor.’ So, I guess we could ask specifically about what the internet is doing. Because I know lots of 14-year-olds, and you’ll ask them how they spend time with their friends. And the number one answer they give is Discord.
About The Honest Broker Podcast
The Honest Broker features in-depth conversations with the leading thinkers and writers of our time. It is a partnership between host Jared Henderson and culture critic Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker, a newsletter covering arts, culture, and media. www.honest-broker.com
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What topics does The Honest Broker Podcast cover?
The Honest Broker Podcast covers topics including Arts, Books, Culture, Society & Culture. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
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