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.

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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 Interview

Jared: 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. Jared: Were these students who probably wouldn’t have applied to the university if it weren’t for the honors college?Jennifer: I think some of them, yes. They had to do a separate application for honors, and we’re very clear that it is a lot of effort. I was always impressed by how many young people wanted to do this, because it’s reading thousands of pages of difficult books every semester for two years. We built a residential college, and they were living together in a community, with all kinds of activities. We were bringing in money, grants, and donors. Then it all ended just about as quickly as you might imagine. Jared: Before we go into exactly how it ended, let’s talk a little bit about what the curriculum was like. Jennifer: We built it to be collaborative with the faculty who are teaching it. The most controversial thing was that it was a set curriculum. Everyone is going to teach the same syllabus. And that was for the simple reason that I wanted to build community. It was four semesters of great books from Homer to Hannah Arendt.

The first semester of freshman year, it was Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. You’re reading texts that would be considered sacred. You’re reading epic poems. You’re reading philosophy. You’re reading tragedy. You’re reading history. Then the second semester is the Long Middle Ages, emphasis on long. We read Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, the Divine Comedy — and we read all of it, because if you just read Inferno you’re not going to understand what he was up to. We also read St. Benedict’s Rule, because medieval monasticism is so important. Jared: If they’re reading Benedict’s Rule, they’re also going to get something like lectio divina. They’re going to get some kind of an idea of close reading that’s not deconstructive reading.

Jennifer: In your first year, you’ve gone from Homer to Calvin. That’s a huge range of time. And I want to stress that these are seminars. There are no lectures or secondary sources.

In your sophomore year, it’s the Birth of Modernity. That’s basically Machiavelli to Mary Shelley. You get Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx. We read Don Quixote, which is a lot, but also very fun.Jared: This is probably where students are likely recognizing names more. Maybe they recognize some names early on in the Greek stuff.

Jennifer: But I’m not expecting incoming freshman to be conversant yet. Then in the last class, it is just the 19th and 20th century. That starts with de Tocqueville. Then we get to Hannah Arendt, and then every instructor gets a free text so they can end wherever they want.

Jared: What semester do you think the students enjoyed the most?

Jennifer: I didn’t run a survey, but I would put a lot of money on Three Ancient Cities being the most popular class.

Jared: So the students would do this for two years and then finish their studies in the broader University of Tulsa.

Jennifer: Yes. Our idea was that what we really needed to fix in higher education is general education. When you go to university, you have general education requirements. And the way that it functions in most universities is like a big cafeteria or buffet. Somebody hands you 10 categories, and they’re like ‘You need a green vegetable, you need three proteins, you need dairy.’ And students kind of look and see what’s left over or what looks good. That’s your general education. It’s incoherent. It’s mostly a matter of luck.

It used to be obvious to everyone that general education should be liberal, right? It’s not yoked to expertise or any sort of output. It’s a kind of formation, and it was thought that you needed a certain kind of liberal formation. Small ‘l’ liberal, not political or partisan.

Jared: I’m ashamed of this fact, but I managed to get a PhD in philosophy without reading The Republic.

Jennifer: It wasn’t your fault.

Jared: I took the history classes that were available. I checked the boxes. Then I went to grad school, and they assume that you’ve read Kant, The Republic, things like that.

Jennifer: Where did you go?

Jared: The University of Connecticut.

Jennifer: Did they even hope you’d read it? Did they care? Honest question.

Jared: One or two people there probably cared.

Jennifer: Were they Pitt people?

Jared: They were. Do you know Lionel Shapiro?

Jennifer: Of course.

Jared: Lionel cared.

Jennifer: What a good man. He’s from the old days of Pitt where it was like ‘You’re going to know your stuff.’

Jared: His history of philosophy seminars were notorious for the sheer intensity you had to bring to them.

Jennifer: Because he had experienced it!

Jared: My speculation is that new graduate students are coming in and have already started specializing. They’re pre-specialized. I started specializing as soon as I could.

Jennifer: I could go on a really long, angry tirade about how much I’m opposed to that. But back to the general point about higher education. Honors colleges are uniquely American. They function as a way for a very bright student to do their general education with honors classes. I sort of saw this as an opportunity to provide a general education that was truly liberal. My hope was that we could prove this is popular, that students want it, and that it works.

You just want to really kind of develop what Aristotle would call intellectual virtues. And you want to do it for the sake of human excellence, human flourishing.

Jared: So what happened?

Jennifer: I got fired. The president who courted me left, and then the provost did too. A new provost comes in, and the first thing she did was get rid of honors. They cut the budget by, I think, 92%. Almost everyone I hired was gone. We were pretty disruptive of the status quo, and I think maybe that wasn’t appreciated by everyone.

Jared: There’s this story that we tell about higher education: student’s don’t want to read, students aren’t interested, the kinds of things you’re offering doesn’t speak to students’ experiences, interests, or needs. I don’t think that’s a narrative you buy.

Jennifer: No, it makes me so angry. It feels patronizing to students. It’s also just false, and it’s a great way to excuse oneself from doing your job. And I think that everyone needs to ask themselves to what extent is student disengagement a reflection of problems in class or the university that need to be addressed? Maybe we can’t teach in the same way we’ve been teaching. I don’t think that the traditional lecture is the best mode of doing philosophy. Philosophy is dialectic.

Jared: When I was still in the classroom, even if I had a class of only 30 for an introductory class, my goal was to see how quickly I could get them talking to each other. As soon as they do that, and they see that there is a real disagreement, that what one person thinks is obvious another thinks is absurd…suddenly, they’re doing philosophy.

Jennifer: I learned pretty early on that if you start out lecturing at students, it’s disruptive to expect them to talk. So, I just decided to flip that. I would start every class by asking questions. That totally reorients them.

I think that one thing that was so important about the honors seminar is that it was a conversation. It was conversation sustained over an hour and some change. There’s a lot of formation going on in conversation. Wisdom requires the cultivation of certain virtues, and the best context in which to pursue both of those things is intellectual friendship. The students were friends, and they were friends who did not agree.

Jared: What is honors at Tulsa like now?

Jennifer: You’d have to ask the students. I’m on sabbatical, and I’m not teaching honors.

Jared: Were there any texts that you had in your curriculum that students hated?

Jennifer: What a great question. There were some texts that didn’t land as well as others. Some of the history texts were like that. A lot people did not like the Federalist Papers. Some people really didn’t like Sappho. Everybody loves Homer.

Jared: With many of these texts, they are so much weirder than you expect them to be.

Jennifer: The students are always surprised by how how naughty medieval literature is. They were like, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a lot of adultery in this.’

Jared: I want to ask you for a book recommendation for our audience. We’re looking for books that you think everybody should read. Do you have something for us?

Jennifer: People should read a book by Zena Hitz called Lost in Thought. It’s very much related to the things that we’ve been talking about. Zena is a tutor at St. John’s, a philosopher, and a friend of the perennial philosophy. It’s a beautiful book. It’s part memoir, part defense of the liberality of liberal learning. She really leans into the idea that seeking knowledge for its own sake is deeply, deeply connected to human flourishing. And she does it by showing it.

Jared: Jennifer Frey, thank you for joining us.

Jennifer: Thank you.

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.

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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 Interview

Jared: 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 from a lot of mainstream outlets anymore. There’s less room for literary nonfiction. When you look at New Journalism, with people like Tom Wolfe, or Joan Didion, or Gay Talese — they had very particular styles, right? They didn’t all sound the same. What bothered me about the internet era was it felt like there was a real flatness to the prose. I have really enjoyed this era much more.

Jared: It’s gone past that kind of voiceless, generic, Millennial snark.

Ross: I called it Gawker speak. The snark voice. That was so dominant. Very irony-drenched, very casual, humorous but kind of bitter. When it started, there was something refreshing about it. But then that took over the internet. I felt like the capital ‘L’ literary was lost in that, and I also felt like other types of idiosyncratic writing could not break through in the same way.

Jared: So tell me a little bit about the thought that went behind founding The Metropolitan Review. What are you trying to accomplish with this? Because I do think it sits in a really interesting space. It’s long-form. Pieces are usually over 3,000 words, which on Substack is huge. You’re also going to have a print edition.

Ross: Yes, we are planning for a print edition. It’s going to be very nice. We have a great team: Lou Bahet, Vanessa Ogle, Django Ellenhorn. Lou wanted to do something longer-lasting, that could sit on your bookshelf. So, we’re taking our time to get it there, and we have a printer in place, and now it’s really just getting these logistics in order.

I wanted to start a publication that’s going to review books, because it is harder and harder to get books reviewed. I also wanted a publication that lets the writer be the writer. We do edit The Metropolitan Review, but the edit will never erase someone’s voice. You will sound like yourself. We don’t have a single house style.

Jared: I think that the choice you’re making to have a premium printing is the right one. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy authors as well. They expect that their books won’t sell well unless they get big on TikTok. But you make your money by then later printing 1,500 copies of an ultra-premium edition.

Ross: That’s amazing. It’s a great idea.

Jared: We’re not going to see a return to the old paperback era, where you could make a living just churning out science fiction paperbacks over the weekend. But you can cultivate a fan base that will pay for the real thing, and they don’t just want a hardback. They want a really luxurious item that they can put on their shelf.

Ross: Exactly.

Jared: When I was reading Glass Century, I noticed that the way you write it had an ambivalence about identity throughout. Very early on, there’s a fake wedding between Mona and Saul. There are these little conversations that let people know everyone’s ethnic backgrounds. Saul will tell you the difference between German Jews and Russian Jews. So, I thought this was an ‘identity-first’ book. But your main character, Mona…she doesn’t care. Was that intentional?

Ross: I think I have always felt very ambivalent about it. I am a secular Jew. I had a bar mitzvah and did a little Hebrew school, but I never identified myself first as a Jew or even as a white person. I always felt that I am me and my interests. Some would say that’s a luxury and a privilege, and I accept that. Having grown up in New York City, I always understood identity was very complicated.

I didn’t grow up with a great distinction between the German and the Russian Jew, but I knew my history. I understood that the German Jew and the Russian Jew are, in fact, quite distinct. I’m descended from the Russian Jews, the Jews who came from the pogroms of the 19th century. The fled here during the era of mass immigration, and that’s why I’m always going to be pro-immigrant. So, it’s a little similar to Saul in the book. The German Jew is very assimilated, was wealthier. They also tended to be almost Christian-passing.

Jared: I think Saul uses the phrase ‘barely part of the tribe.’

Ross: Yes, that’s how the German Jew is seen. Dianne Feinstein, the late senator from California, is a great example of this. She was a German Jew who grew up in San Francisco. She attended a Catholic school, and that was something that was not uncommon if you were part of this older community.

Jared: I liked Glass Century because it was a book that took identity seriously, but it didn’t make it the only focus.

Ross: I’ve found the woke/anti-woke binary very exhausting. I think we need to move back to universal values. There’s a very healthy way to talk about identity. You can’t talk about American history without the sins of slavery. Before we recorded this, I walked to the Texas capitol. It was very interesting to see a Confederate monument. And it sits there, very distinctly, a block away from an Austin pride flag. We can’t dismiss the sins of the past, but we have to acknowledge progress.

Jared: One of my favorite cultural institutions in the United States is the Library of America. I ask myself ‘Why doesn’t every country have a publisher that does this?’ And I love the fact that in the Library of America, you read the foundational documents of the United States. You read Black writers during Reconstruction. You read New York City Jews in the 1970s. It’s remarkable.

Ross: You see throughout American history that there’s this push-pull. It’s cycles. It’s battles. It is great terror and great failure, mixed with great hope and great success. And that is the story of America that should be told, because that is the story of America.

Jared: Let me read something to you: ‘We are fattened, bloody flesh sacks doomed to obsolescence, pacified by programs that will do all the thinking and feeling for us. If we stop thinking, what is left? To submit? To putter along like amoebae?’

That’s you writing about the New Romanticism and AI. So why don’t you tell us how you really feel?

Ross: New Romanticism is very interesting to me. Ted Gioia originated the idea, and it drew me in right away. I think it captures a general mood. A growing number of people are very disenchanted with technology as it stands today. They are looking to older forms, a return to a more interpersonal and in-person dynamic, a real turn away from techno-optimism. I believe that we are in a space where we understand technology’s ill effects.

Why is it for tens of thousands of years, humanity could paint paintings, write novels, use imagination? Why do you need a machine to replace that? I get why you need a machine to lift a heavy object. I get why you need a machine to do complex mathematical calculations. I get why you need a machine to do medical exams. We need machines for many things. The proponents of AI don’t really say why you need a machine to make what is now very mediocre art.

Jared: Do you have a book recommendation for our audience?

Ross: Ken Kesey is very famous for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is a great book. No one knows his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, which is this wonderful epic of the Pacific Northwest. It was a formative novel in my youth, and I highly recommend it.

Jared: Ross Barkan, thanks for joining me.

Ross: Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.

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 Interview

For 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 thinking through these issues and then say ‘I’m still figuring it out,’ that might just reflect the complexity of the problem.

Nicholas: It reflects the complexities of the technology, which is constantly changing, and also the complexities of human psychology.

Jared: Tell me a little bit about some of the early optimism about things like radio.

Nicholas: Commercial radio came around in the 1920s, but almost a century before that, we saw the invention of the telegraph, which was the first kind of electric technology. It was the first time that speech and information, human expression could move faster than human beings could carry it. The telegraph comes along and suddenly long distance communication is instantaneous. This creates huge enthusiasm — not just enthusiasm, but a kind of wonder. For the first time, it seemed like something essential to an individual human being could be separated from their physical body and have its own life.

In the book, I talk about ministers and preachers talking about this as a gift from God. It becomes this sense that because we can communicate instantaneously with basically anyone around the world, then that’s going to solve all society’s problems, because all society’s problems come from a fact that people can’t talk to each other easily. Nikola Tesla said in an interview ‘I’m going to be remembered as the guy who got rid of war.’ There’s no way you would fight somebody when you can talk to them instead. And then we have Marconi, who actually does invent radio, who says something very, very similar. He says this in 1913, and of course, in 1914 World War I breaks out.

Jared: Can you tell me a little bit about this concept in the book of dissimilarity cascades?

Nicholas: This concept of the dissimilarity cascades, I think, is very important. Human beings have a bias to like people who they sense are similar to themselves and to dislike people who they sense are dissimilar to themselves. And what we assume is that the more we learn about somebody else, the more we’ll see how they’re like us and therefore the more we’ll like them.

While our instinct to like someone is strong, our instinct to dislike another person is actually slightly stronger. When you start getting more information about somebody, as soon as you see some way that they’re different from you, some way they’re unlike you, you start to put more and more emphasis on those differences. We begin to emphasize how they’re dissimilar to us.

If you wanted to design a media system that would set off dissimilarity cascades, social media is kind of precisely what you design because it encourages people to disclose as much as possible as quickly as possible about themselves. We’re sort of these buzzing, blooming individuals, and if we present ourselves like that to others, they’re going to be overwhelmed and not know how to make sense of us.

Jared: We’re asking guests to recommend a book to our listeners. Maybe it’s a book everybody should read, but nobody is. Do you have anything for them?

Nicholas: If people know Neil Postman, it’s for his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death. But after that, he wrote a shorter book called Technopoly. It looked ahead to computers and the kinds of things that are online. And I think in many ways, it was even more prophetic than Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s also a short book, so you don’t have to have a huge attention span anymore to read it.

Jared: Nicholas Carr, thank you for joining us here at The Honest Broker.

Nicholas: Thanks, I enjoyed it.

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 Interview

For 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. It’s sitting in voice chats rather than going out. They might watch YouTube videos and stream them live and then just talk over voice chat. Even with people who are in the same city as them! I grew up on the internet, but there was still a sense that there was your online life, but then you go and do stuff. To put it very coarsely, there’s just been this massive decline in going out and doing stuff.

Derek: There’s a huge decline in going out and doing stuff. There’s specifically a huge decline in partying. This was one of the single biggest pieces I’ve written on Substack so far: ‘The Death of Partying in the USA.’ I think the way the American Time Youth Survey puts it is hosting or attending parties, social events, or ceremonies has declined something like 70% for young people.

You might ask: how do you know that texting people or hanging out on Discord or playing a video game with your bros in your headset isn’t a perfect substitution for hanging out in the physical world that makes us just as happy? That’s a very complicated and rich question. I think it deserves a lot of research. But I think it’s important to put two facts next to each other. Number one: the decline of face-to-face socializing. Number two: the fact that people, and young people in particular, are not happy with their lives. I do want to point out that this incredibly important shift in the way that we are with each other in our friendships and our relationships has coincided with an absolute plummeting of life satisfaction. And one reason I think Putnam was wrong is that we aren’t ourselves on the internet.

Jared: There’s an idea that I’ve been toying with more and more that one of the reasons that we’re so comfortable being mean to each other online is that it’s very easy to view each platform that you’re on or each account that you have as a different self. It’s like a completely different personality that I get to try out. You get to A/B test the self, and you don’t immediately feel the negative social consequences because you could just make another account. Where in real life, there’s no rebranding.

Derek: I don’t think I’ve ever quite put it like that. Just to challenge it: I don’t really believe that most people think of themselves as being a kind of unified self in every circumstance. There’s who I am at the office. There’s who I am at home. We are different people in different circumstances. And that’s a truth that pre-exists and co-exists with the internet itself. But I do think there’s a kernel of truth in what you’re saying. I have a sense as I move throughout my day that I’m a different, I’m purposefully code-shifting and self-shifting as I move between contexts. And so I do think that you might be right that a part of what we’re putting our finger on here, a part of what makes the internet strange, is that we assume these kind of sideways identities that are related to us but not fully us. There’s a deliberate sense of performance.

What I think is causing that is the distinction between one-to-one communication and broadcast. That’s always a weird thing about podcasts. When you’re having a one-to-one conversation, a real one, like if there weren’t cameras here, I would have no choice but to just focus on you. But when I’m typing into a box, where I’m holding a self-facing camera for YouTube or for Instagram, I can’t think about any other one particular person. And because I can’t focus on 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 people at once, I’m really focused on myself.

Jared: I occasionally will meet someone who’s maybe seen some of my YouTube videos, and they’ll say I’m quieter than they expected. I don’t even have a particularly large personality on YouTube.

Derek: But there’s no listening on YouTube. Why would you ever make a video of you listening?

Jared: Exactly. I guess if that form of communication is so unnatural, then it seems plausible to say that it’s bound to have some at least strange consequences when it becomes the dominant form of communication. When most of your communication is broadcast rather than face-to-face, how you think about communication is going to eventually shift.

Derek: There are studies that have basically been done, I think at Penn Wharton, that show that if you write a letter to one person versus writing a letter that you know many people will read, the contents of that letter change. When you’re writing to a thousand people, you just talk about yourself. And so just knowing that you’re going from talking to one person versus many people makes the content of the message more focused on the self.

I think you could extrapolate a finding like that to the idea that we’re moving from a more physical world to a more digital world conversation. I find that when I’m talking to other people, I’m living in their mind a lot of the time. To be in front of your phone, posting, you’re not inside of any one person’s mind. You’re often inside of your own. I do think that maybe one reason why we have rising rates of anxiety and depression is that people who are anxious and depressed are lost inside of their own thoughts.

Jared: I have been wondering about the turn that people have toward forming relationships with various LLMs, with various forms that we call AI. You wrote a piece about the way that people are turning to AI for therapy. I believe the website Catholic Answers released a sort of AI priest who would give spiritual advice. Then he said heretical things, and they quickly defrocked him. On Reddit, there are whole subreddits dedicated to forming relationships with AI. So more and more we’re turning to having these very intimate conversations with machines rather than human beings.

Derek: I think there’s two questions there that are both really interesting. Question number one is, why is AI so good at being a therapist? And then two, what’s the cost of turning to AI as a therapist or a friend if it seems to be working for people? My wife’s a clinical psychologist. I’ve talked to people in her program about the fact that they consider AI to be quite a talented therapist at delivering cognitive behavioral therapy in certain steps and exposure therapies. Some therapy is quite schematic, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. And so these are skills that I think you really could teach in artificial intelligence.

Another part of being a good therapist is validation. This technology is very good at doing lots of things that therapists are supposed to do, but a great therapist is not just a professional validator. There are people who have obsessive compulsive disorder. Their compulsions are disordered. AI is not as good at telling people that their delusions are delusional, that their problems are actually problematic, that their thought patterns are actually disordered.

People who get into these long conversations with LLMs end up in some cases going to the hospital because their delusions are deepened by their interaction with these technologies, not resolved or remedied by their interactions with them. A part of being a good therapist is telling your patients when they’re wrong. A part of being a good friend is telling your friends when they’re nuts. And this technology has been honed through both engineering and human feedback to be sycophantic. The problem that you’re identifying is larger than just AI as a therapist or AI as a friend. This really, I do think, is a fundamental problem with artificial intelligence, period. It can’t tell you when you’re asking the wrong question. What I see is an engine for the mass production of narcissism at scale

Jared: You’ve also written on the literacy crisis in the United States or the decline of reading. Do you think that this is in any way related to your interest in the antisocial century?

Derek: I do think we’re seeing the end among college students of writing as well. We’re already seeing the decline of reading. Now we’ve invented this tool whereby if you’re assigned take-home essay on anything—a book or a piece of history—you can turn to a large language model and it will essentially write that essay for you. If thinking is like pitching and throwing a baseball is practicing for pitching, what is practicing for thinking? I think it’s reading and writing. And so if we now have clear statistical and anecdotal evidence that people are reading less and outsourcing the learned skill of writing to large language models, where is deep thinking supposed to come from in the future?

Jared: We’re looking for book recommendations for our audience. Do you have something for us?

Derek: Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years. Not only is it an absolute blast to read, it is about the period of time that I consider most interesting in human history. It’s an era where so much of what we consider to be the modern world was invented. We didn’t just invent cars and planes. We invented aspirin and basketball. It’s a beautiful book in explaining essentially how these inventions made the Western world lose its mind.

Jared: Derek Thompson, thank you for joining us.

Derek: Thank you.

James Marriott is a columnist at The Times of London and the author of Cultural Capital here on Substack. He recently published ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’, an article about the worldwide literacy crisis, which was a platform-wide sensation.

The literacy crisis is one of my interests as well. I’ve previously been interviewed on the subject alongside James at UnHerd, and I’ve released multiple YouTube videos about the subject, too. So, I knew I needed to ask him to sit down for interview on The Honest Broker.

This is a big day at The Honest Broker, and I have several important announcements to make.

First, we’re launching a video interview series. In the coming weeks, we will share in-depth interviews with the leading thinkers and writers of our time. Our goal is simple: Smart conversations with smart people.

Please support The Honest Broker by taking out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).

These will be available here on Substack, but also on YouTube and other platforms. Here’s a link to our new YouTube channel—I encourage you to subscribe.

I also want to introduce the host of our interview series, Jared Henderson. I’ve admired Jared’s work for a long time. He’s a philosopher by training, and a brilliant commentator on the pressing issues and leading ideas of our time. He’s also a popular YouTuber and Substacker, and is working on his debut book (entitled The Intellectual Life) for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

I’m delighted to have him join me at The Honest Broker.

Finally, I want to introduce our debut guest for the interview series. Cory Doctorow has been an incisive commentator on culture and technology for many years. But he is also a novelist, activist, blogger, web entrepreneur, and public gadfly of the highest order.

Cory has a new book coming out today, entitled Enshittification, and this promises to be one of the most widely discussed topics of our time.

Below is a transcript of some highlights from the interview. You can watch the interview in its entirety at the video link above.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE CORY DOCTOROW INTERVIEW

Jared: We are here to talk about your new book, Enshittification, and I wanted to ask you what it’s like to be a guy who coined this term that became word of the year at several online dictionaries and has also entered internet slang so widely.Cory: It’s very exciting to have entered the lexicon of so many people. It’s not just Internet slang. It gets used in a lot of different contexts. I hear people talk about the enshittification of endocrinology and the enshittification of F1 and so on. So it’s definitely gone beyond just online services, although I coined it with a very precise technical meaning, a meaning that relates to the specific contours of how digital platforms go bad.

Jared: Talk a bit about what you mean exactly by enshittification. Everyone understands, or they all sense, that the internet has gotten worse, the world has gotten worse, the technologies that we use regularly have gotten worse, but you go beyond that. It’s not just that it has gotten so bad. There’s a cycle that it follows. Could you elaborate on that?

Cory: Well, look, I’m very happy for people to use this colloquially. If 10 million normies use this to just mean things get worse, and 1 million of them go figure out what I mean by that, that’s a million people I never would have reached.Platforms are the endemic form of enterprise on the internet. It’s an intermediary. It’s a business that connects two or more groups. And these platforms go bad in this very typical way. First, they’re good to end users, and they find a way to lock those end users in. And then once the end users are locked into the Roach Motel—users check in, but they don’t check out—they make things a little worse for those end users, knowing that they can’t readily leave. And the reason they make things worse for end users is not out of sadism. It’s because often the things that are good for end users are bad for business customers and vice versa.

And that’s stage two. But in stage three, once the platform has both end users and business customers locked in, it can claw back all the value for itself.

Jared: There’s one case of enshittification that I can discuss with anyone, and they immediately recognize it: Google search, which makes up a fairly large portion of your book.

Cory: Google acquired a 90% market share for search, and they did so illegally. Everywhere you might find a search box, Google paid millions or billions of dollars to make sure that was wired into Google’s own servers. The problem with a 90% search market share, which sounds very good, is that you can’t grow it, right? Google could breed a million humans to maturity and make them into Google customers, and that would be Google Classroom, but it’s a slow process to raise a billion humans to maturity.

Jared: Google would probably decide that at about age six, the product should be killed.Cory: That’s right! They go to the Google graveyard. So Google gets into a panic about not growing in search anymore. And we see this clash of these two key executives at Google. And we see this because the DOJ published the email correspondence.

There’s this guy, Pragavar Raghavan, who’s an ex-McKinsey guy, and he’s in charge of revenue for Google search. Raghavan’s idea to grow Google search revenue is to make Google search worse. You’re going to have to search twice or maybe three times to get the answer you’re looking for. And that’s two or three times we can show you ads.Jared: So why don’t we talk about some of these disciplines that sort of are there originally to help prevent enshittification. You mentioned competition and regulation. There was one that you mentioned that I thought was really interesting, which was self-help.Cory: In politics and in law, self-help is a measure that you can take on your own without having to wait for a policymaker or an enforcer to act on your behalf. In the digital world, we’ve had this incredible and powerful form of direct self-help because digital technology is uniquely flexible in a way that’s very hard to maybe get your head around if you’re not like someone who is into the kind of theory of computer science.

Every computer that we know how to make is capable of running every program that is valid. And what this means is that for every 10-foot pile of s**t that some platform installs in their product, there is an 11-foot dis-enshittifying ladder that you can install in your computer that goes over it. Starting in the late 90s and accelerating through this whole century, we have seen the expansion of a suite of laws, commonly called IP laws. But the best way to understand what someone in business means when they say, ‘I have some IP here’ is what they mean is ‘I have a right I’ve secured in law that allows me to control the conduct of my customers, my critics, and my competitors.’

Jared: This is not limited to the purely sort of what we think of as the digital world. And that’s because the digital world is not confined to your laptop browser. Everything has a computer chip in it. Everything is being sort of filtered through some kind of app interface. So, if I want to do something to my refrigerator, it has a computer chip in it, and then it can be protected under the DMCA.Cory: GE has a charcoal replaceable filter in their fridges. Its bill of materials is about eight cents. They charge $50 for it, but they also have a 25-cent chip in it that stops you from using a generic cartridge. And bypassing that chip is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.

Jared: What are the large-scale, structural solutions? Maybe give me the two-minute version of that. What would it be like if we’re going to build a better internet and a better world?

Cory: Well, I’m glad you said structural. There really isn’t anything you can do as an individual. If you’re in an election where you vote with your wallet, then the guy with the fattest wallet is going to win every time, which is why rich people want us to only vote with our wallets. You have to be part of a polity. To make a structural change, you have to be part of a structure.

I’ve worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 24 years. We have a national network in the United States of affiliate groups called the Electronic Frontier Alliance. They work on state and local issues. That is one place where you could get started today. Go to efa.eff.org, and you can find a local group. And if you can’t find one, you can start one.Jared: Well, the last question I want to ask you is something we ask all of our guests. We’re looking for book recommendations for our audience. We’re looking for books that you think everybody should read. What’s a book you would recommend?

Cory: It’s a book by Theodora Goss. She is a Hungarian-American science fiction writer, and it is called Letters from an Imaginary Country. It is extraordinarily beautifully written science fiction that is very weird, but also very accessible. She’s such a talented prose stylist; every word is like a drink of wine. And so I cannot recommend it enough. It’s from a small press called Tachyon Press, but you should be able to get it in any bookstore.

Jared: As with all of our book recommendations, we’ll put that down in the description. Cory, thank you so much for joining us.

Cory: Thank you.