Fewer Than 3 Friends

15 artificial friends: “The average American has, I think, fewer than three friends…and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends….The average person wants more connection than they have,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Dwarkesh Patel on his podcast. (Meta just launched a standalone AI chat app that will compete with ChatGPT and Claude.) “There’s a lot of questions that people ask, like Is this going to replace in-person connections or real-life connections? and my default is that the answer to that is probably no….There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don’t have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like. I think a lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around, I would guess that over time we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why it is valuable and why the people who are doing these things, why they are rational for doing it, and how it is adding value for their lives.”

I’m sympathetic to Zuckerberg’s argument, which is about alternatives, recognizing that not every person will have the optimal community they desire. But people’s social muscles will atrophy when they resort to hollow, virtual connections as a loneliness anesthetic. They’ll be able to pacify their yearning most of the time, while losing their ability to put themselves out there and be vulnerable and face rejection, and they won’t realize what they’re missing until it’s too late and they’re truly in need. And, look, profit isn’t inherently bad, not in the slightest. But all of this is made a bit more dystopian because Zuckerberg stands to gain financially from more people adopting chatbot relationships (provided they’re with his company’s chatbots), opting out of real-world connectivity and opting into the thing his coders made.

Perhaps Spike Jonze’s Her is actually the way: The chatbot is used as a balm for the protagonist to get over a divorce and heal emotionally. But in the end, he opts out, walks away, and moves on, inviting his lady neighbor, who is also reeling from a divorce (aided by chatbots that forced the couple apart, or were maybe just coping mechanisms for a couple already riven), to come sit on the roof of their building with him to watch the sunrise. People will have access to the technology, and it may introduce new problems (and solutions) to their lives, but they’ll have to make the deliberate, conscious choice to opt into physical-world existence with other human beings, seeing its value once again. (For more on these themes, check out the Just Asking Questions episode that will be released later today, featuring Ross Douthat.)

Economic outlook grows ever more bleak: This morning, the Bank of Japan revised its economic growth forecasts for the year, now expecting 0.5 percent growth in the fiscal year that started on April 1 vs. the 1.1 percent that it had forecast back in January. As a result, they will keep interest rates constant. Kazuo Ueda, the governor of the Bank of Japan, “cited the imposition of an ‘unprecedented level’ of tariffs by the United States” as the reason for the changed growth forecast, per The New York Times.

Last month, the International Monetary Fund lowered its 2025 outlook for all G7 nations—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.—citing our new tariff policy as the reason why.

And yesterday, our own Commerce Department noted that gross domestic product (GDP) adjusted for inflation had declined at a 0.3 percent annual rate over the first three months of 2025. “This was the first quarter of negative growth since Q1 of 2022,” notes CNBC. “Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a gain of 0.4% after GDP rose by 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024. However, over the past day or so some Wall Street economists changed their outlook to negative growth, largely because of an unexpected rise in imports as companies and consumers sought to get ahead of the Trump tariffs implemented in early April.” (Some of this may be attributable to a surge of imports in advance of the imposition of massive tariffs, which would affect GDP because imports get subtracted.)

“Maybe some of this negativity is due to a rush to bring in imports before the tariffs go up, but there is simply no way for policy advisors to sugar-coat this. Growth has simply vanished,” Chris Rupkey, chief economist at Fwdbonds, told CNBC. And the worst is still yet to come, because long shipping times mean U.S. ports are still receiving plenty of goods from China that were sent prior to high tariffs being announced; the new, more expensive, less abundant reality isn’t quite here yet.

“Investors are in for a shock in the next few weeks as the slowing flow of goods from China underscores the risks tariffs bring to the US economy, the latest MLIV Pulse survey showed,” notes Bloomberg. “Of the 248 respondents to a poll conducted April 28-30, 82% said the impact of fewer shipments from China to American businesses is either somewhat or heavily underpriced in markets.” Buckle up.

Scenes from New York’s neighbor: “Amid strained negotiations with the union that represents its train drivers, New Jersey Transit began telling its customers on Wednesday to prepare for a shutdown of the statewide rail service as soon as May 16,” reports The New York Times. “It would be the first such strike in New Jersey in more than 40 years.”

• “What economic indicator should we watch closely to know if AI is starting to really change the whole macroeconomy?” asks The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson. His attempt at answering that question is here. 
• Attorney General Pam Bondi claims that fentanyl seizures by law enforcement over the first 100 days of the Trump administration have saved 258 million lives. (It’s implied that they’re American lives.) This, uh, does not seem plausible.

Listen to her! She’s saying that if they hadn’t confiscated that fentanyl, 258 million Americans would have died.

That’s 2/3 of us. Bless you President Trump!
pic.twitter.com/k4sx5JhNYY

— Carl (@HistoryBoomer) April 30, 2025

• New Pravda just dropped:

NEW: Trump admin. launches ‘White House Wire’

https://t.co/9n5bPnct90 pic.twitter.com/TPyo00oMGM

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 1, 2025

• Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to make it so that candy and sodas are not eligible to be purchased via food stamps, reports News Nation.
• “The White House deserves credit for revitalizing diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine. In its haste for a deal, however, its proposals have too often looked indistinguishable from a surrender on Russia’s terms,” reports Bloomberg. “American negotiators have offered up a ceasefire plan that would leave Russia in de facto control of almost all the Ukrainian territory it currently occupies. In addition to land, Putin would win substantial sanctions relief. The US may also formally recognize Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. Ukraine would be allowed to maintain its military but be offered only vague security guarantees, to be enforced by an ad hoc coalition of allies (not including the US). For at least the duration of the current US administration, it would be barred from joining NATO.”

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