The number of connections we have is not determined by how many followers we have on social media or

how many people, you know, we might invite to a general holiday party. It's really determined by

the number of people with whom we feel we can show up as ourselves, with whom we can be vulnerable,

with whom we can be truly open. That's what defines the highest quality connections.

L.M. Cicacis, who's a technology theorist, you may be familiar with, wrote this great essay early

in the pandemic about doom scrolling. And he basically argues that what we need in times of

uncertainty, like the one we're living through, is not more information, which probably won't give

us the certainty that we're craving, but more friendship, which helps sustain us through the

uncertainty. Yes. I'm John Favreau, welcome to offline. Hey everyone, my guest this week is Dr.

Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States. I've wanted to do an episode on pandemic doom

scrolling for a while now. And for those of you who aren't familiar with the term, it's pretty much

what it sounds like. You just keep scrolling through news about COVID, looking for bits and pieces

of information to make you hopeful that this fucking pandemic will end soon, even though you

inevitably come across panicky headlines that make you feel worse than when you started scrolling.

At least that's been my experience. But I didn't ask Dr. Murthy to come on the show just to ask

him about the Omicron variant, though we did talk about that. I asked him to come on because he

spent a lot of time as surgeon general, both during the Obama administration and now during the Biden

administration, focusing on the importance of mental health. And recently he's been talking about

two factors that are harming our mental health, social media and the pandemic. In fact, just before

our interview, he was at a high school in Los Angeles where he issued a pretty rare public health

advisory about what he calls a mental health crisis among young people. We talked about all of this,

the intersection between the internet and our emotional well-being, why we doom scroll and how to

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