A parent trying imperfectly to look at his kids instead of his screen.

Instagram eating into reading time. Everything seeming urgent when it's not. The simple act of listening to the world go by.

This week, no expert interview - just real people answering four honest questions about their phones:

• When did you get your first smartphone?
• What daily phone habit would have shocked you 10 years ago?
• Ever tried unplugging?
• What does your phone stop you from doing?

The average American checks their phone 205 times a day. Over 43% of us admit we're addicted. In these confessions, you'll hear what we're missing: presence, books, conversation, silence, the sounds of life.

This Week's Analog Assignment: Push aside all that your phone offers and identify what it's taking away. Take it back.

The Analog Hour: analoginadigitalworld.net

When you scroll through news online, can you tell what's fact and what's opinion? If you're struggling, you're not alone - and it's not your fault.

Lynn Walsh is an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, and former ethics chair. In 2016, at the peak of "fake news" claims, Lynn started taking phone calls from Americans who'd lost faith in journalism. What she learned during those conversations changed the trajectory of her career.

In this episode, Lynn explains:

• The labeling problem that's impacting trust in the media
• How sensationalism and bias complaints reveal deeper misunderstandings
• What happens when good journalists go independent
• Why we're all "committing acts of journalism" - and the responsibility that goes with that
• Practical steps to rebuild trust and restore faith in the media

This Week's Analog Assignment: The next time you're about to share something online, pause and ask yourself: Is this accurate? Do I trust this source? Is this news or opinion? If you're not sure, either don't share it - or add context.

Connect with Lynn Walsh: on LinkedIn and at Trusting News

Resources:

• Everyone Should Help Minimize Harm
• SPJ Code of Ethics
• FAQ About Journalism Ethics

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and find out more: analoginadigitalworld.net

There was a time when half of America sat down at the same hour and watched the same tv show. When a moonwalk or a moon landing or a series finale wasn't just an event — it was a shared experience, a cultural reference point that connected strangers at bus stops and colleagues at water coolers and kids on the playground.

That era is over. But what exactly did we lose when it ended — and was it really as good as we remember?

This week on The Analog Hour, I'm joined by Professor Bob Thompson, one of America's leading authorities on television and popular culture, who has spent more than 40 years at Syracuse University studying how what we watch shapes who we are.

We cover a lot of ground — and Bob has a gift for reframing things you thought you understood. We talk about why the age of shared mass culture was actually a case of social engineering; how shows like Leave It to Beaver presented a perfectly polished version of America while the country was immense upheaval.; and why the same technology that once pulled us together is now pulling us apart.

We also talk about I Dream of Jeannie in a way that will ruin it for you slightly. You're welcome.

In this episode:

• Why the era of shared mass culture — from roughly 1890 to 1990 — may be the greatest cultural consensus in human history
• How cable didn't just add channels; it ended the shared cultural conversation
• What All in the Family, MASH, and The Cosby Show reveal about television's complicated relationship with social progress

Professor Bob Thompson is the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. He makes regular media appearances worldwide — from the BBC to the New York Times — to explain what pop culture says about society.

New episodes of The Analog Hour drop weekly (every Friday). Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and find us at analoginadigitalworld.net.

If this episode resonated, please leave a review and share it with someone who still remembers exactly where they were when an event unfolded that touched all of us.

Wanjiku Kamau was laid off from Google — during one of the biggest AI investment booms in history — and realized she'd barely used the technology her own company was betting everything on.

So she taught herself and wrote a book about it: Out of the Loop, Into the Algorithm: How I Finally Made Friends with AI.

But this conversation isn't really about AI. It's about what Wanjiku lost when she lost her job — the barista who remembered her dog's name, the colleagues she spoke to every day for years, the quiet rituals that made her feel like she belonged somewhere. She calls it "an unintended colleague breakup." And if you've ever left a job and been surprised by the grief, you'll know exactly what she means.

About our guest: Wanjiku Kamau is the author of Out of the Loop, Into the Algorithm: How I Finally Made Friends with AI. A former executive at Intel and employee at Google, she now works as a consultant and educator helping professionals understand and work with artificial intelligence without needing to code. Today she speaks and teaches about practical AI literacy, career transitions, and the human skills that matter more as technology accelerates.

Find her book: Amazon or TikTok Shop

Your analog assignment: Find a place where someone knows your name — or, at the very least, your dog's name. Show up and invest in the people there. We are slowly realizing we cannot take these seemingly minor encounters for granted.

What happens when love comes with upgrades, your best matches are behind a paywall, and a chatbot that never disagrees with you starts to feel like the safer option?

Myisha Battle is a certified clinical sexologist, dating coach, and author of This Is Supposed to Be Fun and Sexual Pleasure for Dummies. Based in San Francisco — the tech capital of the world — she has a front-row seat to what technology is doing to intimacy. Her expertise has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Magazine's The Cut, Oprah Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

In this episode, Myisha and I talk about why Gen Z is rejecting dating apps, our increasing skills deficit in face-to-face connection, why our tolerance for the messiness of human interaction is at an all-time low, the rise of AI chatbots as romantic partners, and what she's seeing on the ground — from singles mixers in Oakland to clients learning to meet people "in the wild" again.

Your analog assignment this week: Put your phone away and be present in your own life. Take the earbuds out, look around you, make eye contact.

Links to Myisha Battle's website and books:

myishabattle.com

This Is Supposed to Be Fun: How to Find Joy in Dating

Sexual Pleasure for Dummies

Fabio Bin couldn't find anyone to travel with. So he co-founded WeRoad — a company that puts 15 strangers together on 10-day trips with no algorithm, no matching, no profiles. Just people who don't know each other, sharing rooms and roads and the kind of discomfort that turns out to be the secret ingredient for real connection.

In this episode, we talk about friction-maxxing — the growing rejection of frictionless convenience — and why half the people at Fabio's 50th birthday were strangers he met on trips.

About Fabio Bin: Co-founder and CMO of WeRoad. Effie Award winner. His recent Fortune op-ed on friction-maxxing and the IRL economy argues the next major consumer market will be built on belonging, not screens. Based in Milan.

Links:

• WeRoad
• Fortune article: Why My $150 Million Startup Thinks It Can Solve the $406 Billion Loneliness Problem

Your analog assignment this week: Find someone who thinks differently from you — and just listen. Not to convert or convince, only to understand.

When was the last time you lingered somewhere that wasn't home and wasn't work? A coffee shop, a park bench, a barbershop, a library — a place where you could just be around other people?

Those places are disappearing. And Dr. Gwendolyn Purifoye, an urban ethnographer and Assistant Professor of Racial Justice and Conflict Transformation at the University of Notre Dame, has spent years studying why — and what it's costing us.

In this episode, Gwendolyn takes us from Cherry Lane — the street in her childhood neighborhood where dozens of kids would gather every summer to play — to a present where we can go an entire day without seeing, smelling, or touching another human being. She explains how we formalized play, overscheduled our children, and automated our errands until we quietly lost the spaces where civilization gets practiced. And she offers a thesis I haven't been able to shake: the more we have to be around each other, the better we get at it. The less we have to, the worse we become.

Resources:

• Race on the Move: Public Transportation and Unequal Spaces by Dr. Gwendolyn Purifoye — forthcoming from NYU Press, available for pre-order at NYU Press and Amazon
• "Where Have All the 'Third Places' Gone?" — The New York Times, February 2025
• "Seeing a Pandemic: How COVID Changed Urban Spaces and Places" — Gwendolyn Purifoye, Visual Studies, 2024
• The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg — the 1989 book that coined the term "third place"

Your analog assignment this week: Find your third place. A library, a park, a bench, a coffee shop — somewhere in the actual world. Go there. Go back. And keep going back. You don't have to say a word. Just let yourself be seen.

When did we stop talking to each other — and what is it costing us? Dr. Maryellen MacDonald is a psycholinguist and professor emerita of psychology and language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World.

What she's found is startling: speaking is far more cognitively demanding than listening, reading, or scrolling — and that difficulty is exactly what makes it essential brain exercise. Yet, we're doing it less than ever.

In this episode, we talk about why Gen Z is lonelier and dating less, what helicopter parenting has to do with it, and why the person you've been meaning to call is probably hoping you will.

Resources:

• More Than Words: How Talking Sharpens the Mind and Shapes Our World by Maryellen MacDonald
• Maryellen's essay in the Washington Post: Gen Zers aren't talking and it could cost them

Your analog assignment this week: Call someone. Not a text. Not a voice note. An actual phone call. It'll be awkward for a few seconds. And then it won't.