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welcome to the 406th episode of the prop g pod what's happening in today's episode we're sharing our live conversation with derrick thompson a property favorite and uh derrick is a sub stack writer co-author of abundance and a host of the podcast plain english uh wrote for the atlantic for a long time or i think still does but he's such an impressive young man and such a interesting thinker, and I love the way he writes. Anyways, I'm a huge fan of Derek's. If you don't want to miss our next live stream or other content exclusive to Substack, you can subscribe at ProfitGmedia.com. That's ProfitGmedia.com. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Derek Thompson. good morning and welcome to our live substack here we're excited to be joined by a friend of the pod and one of our sharpest or one of the sharpest voices in media politics that's Derek Thompson. I don't want to say we discovered Derek just because, but I'd like to think that we're so much older than him and he's been so generous with his time. Derek, when did I first meet you? I think I went on your pod like 10 years ago. Is that right? That's right. I did a podcast

with The Atlantic probably 10 years ago that was called Crazy Genius. And we had a conversation about the tech giants based around, was it your first book, The Four?

Yeah, I started late, yeah.

Yeah, and so we talked about Amazon and Google and you had anatomical representations of each company, right? There was the head and the heart. Yeah, the gut and the genitals. Maybe the groin or something.

Anyways, you were sort of an original gangster in this medium as I think about it. You were doing podcasting before it was cool.

Yeah, well, I felt like I was late to the game a little bit because I had been following Bill Simmons who's been podcasting since, you know, the 1990s or something. But yeah, Crazy Genius was really fun. And that was a pure tech show. And that particular season, we really wanted to talk about the tech giants. And so it was just incredible to have someone who'd written a book on it. And I remember talking to my producer when we had you on. She was like, that guy is awesome. Like he could have a potential in this medium. You never know. So yeah, here we are.

It was either that. I had a show on CNN Plus, which got canceled. So I just leaned into podcasting. So yeah, you never know. Failure sometimes opens a door. So the way we're going to do it here, folks, is I'm going to talk to Derek about this fantastic kind of term I like, and that is that we've entered the antisocial century, which fits to a lot of the things we talk about here. Derek and I are going to talk for about another 40 minutes, and then we're going to open it up, and I'm going to read some audience questions here. All right, so let's bust right into it. Again, you've coined the idea of the anti-social century, which is a trend we cover a lot here. Your argument isn't that people are isolated against their will. It's that solitude became comfortable, cheap, and abundant, and people are actively opting for it. In other words, the problem may be that we don't feel lonely enough. How do you think this happened? Set the table here. What's the environment and the atmospherics for what you're calling the antisocial century?

Yeah, first off, I love that setup. I'm so glad that you got to the heart of this piece, which is trying to get at this idea that our crisis is not quite loneliness.

anyways, the crisis is the opposite of loneliness. It's that we don't feel that social cue to be lonely enough. So maybe the best way to think about the antisocial century is to juxtapose it with something like you could call the social century. For the first 50, 60 years of the 20th century, basically every indicator of social belonging and social capital was rising. People were spending more time with each other. They were starting more clubs. They belonged to unions. they had what are sometimes called more third places, like the bowling alleys that Robert Putnam famously wrote about. Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, is actually really remarkable to read now, even though it's now 26 years old. I mean, he has data about how frequently people are writing greeting cards to each other, how frequently they're calling each other on the phone or playing, you know, card games with each other, hosting cocktail parties. All of this was ascendant in the first 60 years of the 20th century. And then Putnam put his finger on this idea that in the last half of the 20th century, all of this was declining, and every single indicator of socialization was declining at the same time. And so he publishes this book, famously, Bowling Alone, and a lot of the sociological community comes out and says, this is bollocks. Putnam doesn't know what he's talking about, and most importantly, he doesn't realize that we're on the verge of a revolution in socializing. That revolution is the internet. We're going to have these sort of new relationships with each other on the internet that are going to replace the declining relationships that we're having in the real world. And then 26 years after he publishes this book, which was so controversial for its thesis, every indicator, again, of socializing is going down. According to the American Time Use survey, the average American spends 25% less time socializing presently in the real world. The American Time Use survey asks about how often people attend or host parties. Americans under 25, Gen Z, spend 70% less time at parties than they did just 26 years ago, the year that Bowling Alone was published. So it's like we've had a socializing recession on top of a socializing recession. And I call it the antisocial century because I was, when I wrote this cover story for The Atlantic about a year and a half ago that itself was called the antisocial century. I read this really fascinating economic paper that was trying to summarize the most important social themes of the 20th century. And they said, you know, you've got the rise of female education. You've got the decline of the blue-collar workforce, the rise of the white-collar workforce. You've got delayed childbirth. It had all of these facts. And I thought about, you know, what would it be like to write that same paper about the first 20-so years of the 21st century? What are the most important socioeconomic statistics? I thought, well, we're spending less time with each other. We're getting married less. We're dating less. We're coupling less. We're having fewer children. We have fewer friends. We spend more time in our homes and spend less time in public places. These are all anti-social trends.

So let's just get up and call it the anti-social century. And I've done a lot of writing after that initial cover story to sort of unpack what I consider some of the more surprising implications of the antisocial century on our lives, on the economy, and on politics.

And why should we care? What are the downsides of a culture becoming distinctly more antisocial? And also, are there any upsides?

Yeah, there are absolutely upsides. Let's start there. In many cases, as with so much modernity, we're victims of our own success. People have more freedom than they used to have. They're less bound by the strictures of tradition. You know, one place that people used to gather has been church or synagogue or temple. But there are lots of religious traditions that are bigoted, that are illiberal, that hold people back from being the individuals they could be. So in many cases, you could say that the antisocial century is about the triumph of individualism. But the triumph of individualism has its own costs. if you're disconnected from your family, if you focus on yourself rather than on your social community, if you focus on your career rather than on building a family, well, these can all give you a sense of power. But in the long run, what are you left with? A really ample bank account and a not-so-ample social life. So the reason why I think this is important, let's talk about two reasons. One that's very individual, happiness, and another that's more macro, which is politics. Individually, it seems pretty clear recorded a research that's been done by a lot of different people, especially at the University of Chicago, that people, how to put this, over-demand introversion. If you ask people, how much time do you want to spend alone? People actually tend to want to spend a lot of time alone. They often feel burned out. They want to feel, they want to, you know, watch their own Netflix and scroll their own TikTok in bed or on a couch. But there's some really interesting studies, for example, that have asked people in commutes in Chicago and New York, they've said, do you think you want to talk to a stranger during a commute, and pretty much everyone says, fuck no. Like, please don't make me talk to a stranger on my commute. That sounds like something close to hell. But then they incentivize it. They offer some people some money to participate in a trial, and they randomize some people to talk to strangers. At the end of this train ride, they ask people, the ones who talked to strangers and the ones who didn't talk to strangers, how do you feel right now? How happy do you feel? And the people who have been, in some cases, forced, a little bit maybe against their will to socialize just a little bit more than they might have initially demanded are consistently happier than those who spent time just locked in to themselves. And so one conclusion from this, I think, is that we over demand solitude. In one day, that's not particularly significant. But over time, that adds up. Because if I told you that there was like a pill that would make you 10% happier for the next 15 minutes to hour, I think a lot of people would take that pill. That pill is social connection. It makes us feel better to be around other people and to feel connected to other people. And so what I say toward the end of the initial cover story is, yeah, you could argue that this experiment on the Chicago commuter rail on the L, it only increase someone's happiness for one 15-minute period of time. But life is just one 15-minute

period of time after another, after another, after another. That's what life is. And so I feel like we are disconnecting ourselves from happiness when we disconnect ourselves from other people. That's on the individual level. I think we're locking ourselves out of real joy in a very finite life. More broadly, there's some real interesting research that's come out of Denmark on politics and the fact that men in particular who self-identify as being more socially isolated tend to not experience politics as something that affects or touches their community, but rather something that they see as kind of entertainment. And the word or the phrase that has been used to describe their approach to politics is need for chaos. They have a higher need for chaos. What they want is not politics and policy that solves the world, that fixes the world. what they prefer is politics that is chaotic for its own good. And so I think that a world with more and more solitude is not only going to make us sadder in our finite light of consciousness on this earth, but also it's going to make politics much worse, and that's going to make

the world worse as well. I want to come back to politics in a second, but I'll put forward a thesis. You say we're less happy, which I think there's a ton of evidence, including you live longer when you're more social. But let's talk a little bit. Let's explore the downside. I'll put forward a thesis. I worry that isolation is directly correlated to, I'm going to use a non-academic term, going crazy. And that is if you put an orca, put a mammal alone, you isolate any mammal, an orca, a dog, it starts to go crazy. And that other people and relationships create guardrails and checkpoints, make you feel better about something you express in real life, something you're worried about. It helps soothe those fears. And that other relationships and people are guardrails against starting to believe that, oh, mRNA vaccines all to your DNA, or believing that, oh, this, you know, crazy theory, or immigrants are taking my jobs. It just feels as if people start to lose not only connection, but the Overton window expands beyond something that is healthy. That especially young men, we literally start to go, I mean, for lack of a better term, very antisocial in not a good way. Are we going crazier, more prone to conspiracy theory, more anger, more angry, more, and you talked about this. I hadn't thought about the fact that young men aren't more political. It sounds like you're saying they want some sort of stimulation that maybe they're not getting if they were socializing. But talk about the mental impact of spending way more time alone. Well, the mental impact is very close to what you've

already described. At a psychological level, feeling disconnected from the world, feeling disconnected from other people makes you disconnected in a long run that's really bad. Because I think that friendship, you know, we sometimes think about making friends as something that's just like going out for lunch, like an activity that exists in like single units. But friendship is more like a muscle that you build. In many cases, it can take tens, dozens of hours just spending time with that person to truly form a deep relationship with them. And so if you lock yourself out of that, if you say, I'm going to have fewer friends and I'm going to spend less time with them, which is something we absolutely see among Gen Z. They have the fewest number of friends of any generation that's been studied in the last few decades. Where is that really going to cost them? People who are isolated like this, they might not feel...

feel like it costs them so much on a typical Tuesday or Wednesday. You know, they wake up, they maybe, you know, do a workout, they go to work, they come home, they gamble a little bit on Calci, they watch some Netflix, they go to sleep. Maybe they feel like that's a perfectly stimulating life. But life isn't just Netflix and work. Life is often tragedy. Life is often losing a job, losing a parent, dealing with a mental health crisis. And in those moments, not having a social group to fall back on, that is the real risk. It's interesting, you mentioned two things in your windup. You mentioned socialization and you mentioned vaccines. And there's a way in which those ideas connect in a weird way. You can almost think of socialization as a kind of vaccine against a certain kind of isolating misery. Like, why do you get a vaccine? Do you get a vaccine in order to help you when you're at your healthiest? No, you get a vaccine so that in the worst case, you don't get COVID, measles, rubella, et cetera. So while I think friendship is like delightful in its own intrinsic sense, like I love getting drinks with my friends. I love playing board games with my friends. I love hanging out with my wife. It's also the case that maybe the ultimate payoff of social connection isn't just sharing a martini on a Tuesday night. It's that moment when your parents die, when your sister won't talk to you, when your boss is being terrible to you, when you've lost your job, these kind of, you can almost call them moments of social illness, when what you need is the equivalent of a social vaccine to inoculate you against the inevitable misery that every single person is going to feel in this world, in this life. So that, to me, is the real cost of not exercising the friendship muscle. Being with friends is awesome, but when you really, really need people who understand and love you, when you're in those deep and dark moments, that's where the biggest payoff of friendship can come. And if you haven't been investing in these kind of relationships, then you are entirely on your own at the very moment that you need to be surrounded by love.

And you talk about, well, I'm in Los Angeles at a hotel with a beautiful roof deck. And I got in, checked in, went upstairs to this roof deck. And there's this amazing bar overlooking all of Beverly Hills and Hollywood. And I thought, why aren't it such a beautiful night? Why are more young people here with friends, quite frankly, drinking, socializing, meeting each other? Just such an incredible setting. And then I ordered one drink and I got the bill and with tip, it was 30 bucks. And I thought, okay, that's one reason. Talk a little bit about the economic challenges or the economic forces that are correlated to anti-socialization.

There's this wonderful idea in economics that's called Bommel's Cost Disease. Maybe you've talked a little bit about it, but it's this idea from a late economist, William Bommel, who said that ironically, in an economy where some parts of the economy are getting more productive, other parts of the economy are going to get more expensive. So, for example, if you have a growing economy where everyone's getting richer and like an early industrial revolution, but a four string quartet is still a four string quartet, still a four string quartet, which is not being made more labor productive by any kind of technology, then going to see a symphony or going to see an opera is going to get much more expensive than anything else. So the cost disease essentially says that as technology changes an economy, parts of that economy that are more labor intensive are going to increase in cost relative to the rest of the economy. To put that in simpler terms, as our phones and digital entertainment has gotten dirt cheap, the physical world has gotten relatively expensive. It is cheap to stay at home on your couch and watch Netflix, and cheaper still to forget Netflix, not even pay for a subscription, and instead just scroll through TikTok. That is a zero additional cost experience. Going to a rooftop deck in Beverly Hills to order, let's say, you know, three drinks between you and a friend, that could cost you $100 even before you talk about maybe Ubering out there and Ubering back. And so it's absolutely true. I love that you foregrounded this. It's absolutely true that one barrier here is that the physical world is getting more expensive relative to the digital world because the digital world has been inflected by technology that the physical world has not, right? There is no computer chip revolution for mixing the perfect martini. The martini is still the martini and it's shaken by human hands. So I think that a big problem here is that people aren't getting out of the room because they feel almost pulled into the comfort, the relatively cheap comfort that the room provides. I think another part of this to sort of, you know, pull in some ideas from my other work from last year, Abundance, is that, you know, if the first half of the 20th century was about technology mastering the physical world, the first half of the 21st century has been about escaping the physical world because it is so regulated, right? we've made it much harder to build things. We made it harder to build houses and so young people can't afford them and then therefore they can't start families and maybe there's a decline in socialization because of that. If it's harder to build things in the physical world, then the physical world will mechanically become more expensive. And so people will stay inside and rather than take risks in the world of flesh and blood, try to meet girls, try to meet guys, instead the risks that they take are the cheap thrill risks of staying on your couch

and betting on Kalshi or some sports betting app. And so I think that there are ways in which you can absolutely tell a story that economic forces have changed human behavior and even changed what is an appropriate way to spend your free time, right? It is now considered cool or okay, you know, permissive, to rather than socialize in the physical world, stay home, text a couple people, scroll on TikTok, and place a few bets. And you have this great framing. You have a

theory or you had a piece laying out sort of the effect on young men, and you describe them as monks in the casino. What did you mean by that? Well, so yeah, let's take each part.

So, monks, what do we think about when we think about monks? We think about devout, religious, often men, who spend time in a monastery looking at a finite number of scripts and texts and filling their life with these ideas that they can hold in their hands rather than venturing out into the world and experiencing it in a kind of flesh and blood way. today's monks are not religious they are secular monks and rather than hold traditional scriptures in their hands they hold of course a smartphone and so i think that a lot of young men today are essentially behaving like monks but what makes this particularly strange is that you know it's it's a weird juxtaposition to imagine a monk in a casino but when you think about what people are doing on their phones, increasingly, they're gambling. The average young man now spends significantly more time gambling than he spends reading. I think more than 50% of men were active on betting markets in the last six months. And we see that the costs are not just to their time, that default rates and bankruptcy rates seem to rise in states that admit gambling on phones. And so you have this incredibly strange phenomenon where people are choosing to be alone and then enter into highly risky behavior rather than enter into that kind of risky behavior outside of their home, right? They are introducing themselves to fewer women. They're trying to make fewer friends. They're having sex less. They're driving less. Everything that requires some amount of gumption outside of one's room, that is declining. But everything that involves risk that you can do inside of your room, that is rising. And so that is the phenomenon of the monk in the casino. They're not even entering the physical casino. You know, the casino is perfectly outfitted for their own room. And that, again, is, of course, what makes them monks.

Yeah, we describe it simply as young men need to take more risks offline and less risks online. And Jimmy Carr, who I've just, I'm obsessed with, he basically, he says men should gamble more. But then he goes on to say, start a business, you know, kind of gamble your time, gamble your life, but don't gamble online. What do you think the idea, it strikes me that people or young men take so much risk online in terms of what they say, the things they're willing to believe, how much they spend. Is there a certain amount of risk, a pool of risk that we're willing to take and we've just transferred it from offline to online? Have you thought specifically about risk and the levels of risk and it's just a kind of a distribution problem?

Yeah, I mean, that's almost exactly the way I think about it. I think of it as almost a clean transference of the risk impulse outside of one's home or room toward the risk impulse being entirely cultivated and spent, so to speak, inside of one's room. And I mean, I'm obsessed with this phenomenon. and there's a bunch of different places to take it. I remember in that, at the end of that essay about monks in the casino, I'm really initiated in this inversion of risk where I think I was talking to someone about this phenomenon and they said, you know, the sociologist, the early 20th century sociologist, Max Weber, had this idea that it was Christianity that gave birth to capitalism and Christian asceticism in particular, this idea that, you know, Puritans wanted to save money that could then be pooled. And then that pooled saved money could be used to be invested in other enterprises. And that was the foundation of capitalism. But in a way, what we're seeing now is an entire inversion of that principle because it is capitalism that is giving birth to a kind of wretched asceticism. That is to say like the casino economy is turning our young people into monks. And like that's an unbelievably strange and fascinating phenomenon to me. And again, it's not just fascinating. I think it is fundamentally sad. It is fundamentally sad, even if you like gambling, even if you think that Kalshi is like the most interesting and wonderful invention in the last 20 years. It's sad to me because the research that we have says so strongly that we tend to overvalue and over-demand solitude when we are given solitude as an opportunity. That to under-invest in relationships, To spend less time with other people, to date less, to become less comfortable around other people, is not only depriving ourselves of wonderful conversations and wonderful 15-minute after 15-minute experiences, but it is also, again, depriving ourselves of that ability to, you know, inoculate ourselves against the miseries that inevitably accrue in life when what we really need is a community of people around us to help us.

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let's talk a little bit about solves or solutions i mean it just feels whether it's remote work a decline in church attendance um people remote schooling covid where we got very used to isolation. And then I would argue the thing we haven't discussed, it's just almost an indomitable foe, is that arguably 40% of the S&P has an economic incentive to figure out a way for you to every day spend one more second on a screen and one less with other people. What could we do? I think people are going to nod their heads and say, all right, it just makes a lot of sense. If you're a parent and you see what happens when your kid isn't around other kids for an extended period of time. We can't even take a vacation without having other kids around our kids. They just become so awful. What are some of the solves here? Or if you were advising around public policy or even around parenting, how do we address this?

The first step is recognizing exactly what's being lost, right? When a society is pushing people to take only financial risks and to not take social risks or enterprise risks, you know, starting a company, you are hallowing out the virtues that make strong collective life possible. You're hallowing out trust, curiosity, forgiveness, generosity. That's the receipt of our behavior. And we don't see it when we're alone because we don't see what's being lost when we're with other people. And so I think that one way to solve this is for people to take responsibility, right? Like how did you, how do you solve a problem like smoking, right? Well, you have the Surgeon General make an announcement that says that we have now connected smoking to cancer. So, you know, one thing you could do is you could say, you know, we banned advertisements for smoking and that was powerful. But I think the knowledge itself, like the information itself that smoking was clearly connected to cancer, that was its own lever on reducing smoking, Right. People today, even if maybe they choose to smoke, they do so knowing the risk. They don't need to see or not see an ad for like camel cigarettes to know what the relationship between smoking and their long term lung health is. So a huge part of this for me is just like public awareness. You mentioned earlier in the show that like there's now evidence and I think Kara has pointed to this as well, that social connection seems to correlate really, really strongly with health, with longevity, and in particular, a lot of this research comes out of Northwestern University, with memory in our 80s and 90s. It might be the case, in fact, that the reason that memory's original purpose, before, you know, memorizing abstract ideas and mathematics, that memory's original purpose was social. It was to keep track in your tribe of, like, who's nice and who's duplicitous, who's strong and who's trustworthy, right? Gossip, essentially, is the original purpose of memory. And so it makes sense that as we surround ourselves with social connection, we are working out those sort of original sort of gossip muscles that make us better remembering all sorts of things for work and life. And so making these connections, giving people a sense of what is actually being lost, making them realize that getting a good night's sleep and, you know, working out, eating your vegetables, like all that's important, but socializing might be just as important as going to the gym. Like, social fitness isn't just a metaphor. Like, socializing makes our brains fit. Teaching people about this, I think, is its own power. But the other thing that I think cities have to do, and this, again, comes back to abundance, is to invest more in physical infrastructure. You know, find ways to build parks, find ways to build more homes, so that we can allow

people to move out of their parents' house and into their own place, that we can give them places to socialize that aren't just in their basements and in their rooms. So some of this, I think, is a physical infrastructure investment problem. And some of that is just a knowledge problem. I think people are choosing loneliness, or choosing aloneness, I should say, not knowing

what exactly is being lost. You wrote a piece called The Cult of the Enhanced Self, arguing that medicine, technology, and consumer culture have shifted from curing illness to optimizing normal, healthy life, GLP-1s, peptides, supplements.

wearables, the celebrity status of health influencers, where would you draw the line between discipline as a virtue and optimization as an unproductive end in itself? How much optimizing is not optimization? Yeah, that's a great way to ask the question.

The first thing to say is that caring for your health is good. I'm wearing an aura ring right now. I use it to count my steps, to look at my HRV, even though I'm not really sure what that is, to look at my resting heart rate. I gamify essentially my own body. I play the board game of life on my own self. And I think overall, it makes me healthier. But it's not very difficult to imagine the ways in which my dependence on, my relying on the numbers that I can see in the Aura app can distract me from the numbers that I can't see in my own life, which is to say, if I really wanted to optimize my entire life around lowering my resting heart rate and raising my heart rate variability, which again is a statistic that I'm not sure I entirely understand, but I still want to maximize it anyway. I would never, ever have a glass of wine or cocktail after 7 p.m. Because one thing I can see very, very clearly, very clearly in the data is that if I have that glass of wine at 5.30 before I cook dinner, my sleep is absolutely perfect. I sleep like a tiny baby. If I have that glass of wine or that cocktail after 8 p.m., certainly after 9 p.m., it has a cost. My resting heart rate goes up, my HIV goes down. So if I was just maximizing for the numbers that I can see, I would never, ever meet a close friend late for drinks ever. But that's not what life's about. Like life cannot possibly be about abstract numbers that exist on an aura app that I can't even quite explain to myself. And no doctor can concretely tie to the day that I'm going to die because he doesn't know what diseases I'm going to get or not get or what genetic makeup I have or don't have that predisposes me to those diseases. And so ultimately, if I make those numbers a God, then I'm going to be a significantly less social person because I'm going to say no to half of the cocktail invitations that I get. And so it's ultimately about understanding that there is no formula. The formula is that the formula doesn't exist. You have to create space for balance. You have to allow space for that Aristotelian principle that there should be moderation in all things, including moderation itself. And so, you know, a close friend who recently they realized they got pregnant and they bought a house in the same month, asked me to get drinks at 730 at a cocktail bar right down the street from where I live. That's an easy yes. Like, it has to be an easy yes. HRV can't possibly figure into that. I can't say like, no, I can't do that. Let's meet, you know, a month later for breakfast when my schedule clears. No, like, that's not what being a friend is. And so in a way, I have a friend, Connor Sen, who said it'd be nice if Aura had like some metric that you could maximize for socializing. Because in a way, it's easy to maximize

for the numbers that are legible and the numbers that aren't legible, right? How strong is my social life? There's no resting heart rate figure that can tell me that in any app. What's my resting heart rate? I can see that every single morning. And so in a way, it's like you have to make space. As you're optimizing for all sorts of things that make you healthy and productive, et cetera, make space for the numbers that you can't see. Make space for the fact that you're really not living the optimal life if you're only paying attention to the numbers that are optimizable.

I mean, I think of it as a spectrum, and that is if one is just sitting on your couch eating cheesecake and sort of just no friends, sitting in the dark waiting to die, which, and by the way, your brain will pick up on that and send out the right hormones to help you get there sooner. And then there's 100. You're Jack LaLanne and you're just, you got the Oura rings, the wearables, peptides. You just, you know, cold plunges, the whole thing. Isn't true optimization, and I'm curious if you've seen any data here, that once you get above college 70 or 80, and to be clear, I'm rationalizing my own behavior because one of the reasons I work out so much is such that I can drink. And one of the reasons I try to eat healthy most of the time is such that on a regular basis, I can order dessert. And it's, you know, I have the muscle to be a glucose dumpster for the dessert. Have you thought about where kind of the ultimate sweet spot is? Because I find that people use the term optimization too much. They're going above, call it 80. And it's beginning to devour their life. And they've lost, they are de-optimizing for life. Have you thought about it? it's a spectrum and where are there any studies showing where the right actual right point on the

spectrum is yeah so i i had a um an interview with you and ashley who's a stanford uh scientist who's done a lot of work on the science of exercise everyone knows that exercise is like good for them it's probably good for you but like how is it good for you how exactly does exercise change ourselves it's very difficult to do very difficult to study in humans because like scott if I like put you on a treadmill or, you know, you watched you deadlift and then like had a scientist like cut into your kidney to figure out exactly how it was affecting like the tissue health of your kidney, that'd be a very painful and frankly, incredibly illegal way to study exactly how exercise changes our bodies. So instead of doing it to people, they do it to mice. And the conclusion from you and Ashley's research is that exercise completely transforms the mammal's body. It doesn't just improve the health of the muscles that are being directly worked on. Like if you do a bicep curl, obviously you are exercising your biceps. It changes your brain, it changes your endocrine system, it changes your cardiovascular system. Exercise, he said, is basically the single best medicine that we have ever invented. And of course, we didn't even invent it. It was nature that did it for us. And so his final conclusion is that every minute of exercise that we do adds five minutes to our life. And that's a really amazing statistic, right? Every minute of exercise, at least moderately strenuous exercise adds five minutes to your life. If you go through the alcohol research, if you go through those observational studies, which are not particularly high quality because it's difficult to just like look at a bunch of people, ask how much they drink, and then just sort of rank order by mortality, that's a very crude way to do it. But again, we've never done a randomized controlled trial for alcohol drinking, which is kind of crazy. It's literally never been done in the history of the NIH. But to our best approximation, a single drink seems to reduce, or drinking once a day, so a glass of wine a night, seems to reduce your life by about five minutes per drink. So here's like an amazing equivalence, right? This is science essentially backing up like the Galloway principle of drinking and exercising. It's to say that, yes, there are some things that we do in life that are clearly not longevity optimizing, that are probably taking away from our life. That's, you know, the scoops of ice cream and, you know, the martinis and mezcal and legronis. But it's not as if life is just sitting in a chair and then occasionally drinking a martini. There's lots of things that we can do to add time on the other side of the ledger, of the ledger, in particular, working out. And so if you're someone who can cultivate a life of drinking moderately, and also exercising regularly, you're probably exceeding your sort of genetic allowance for lifespan significantly. You're adding years to your life rather than taking them away. So I'm entirely, I feel like even the way that the health optimizers think

about optimizing is suboptimal. If socializing extends your life, and socializing improves your septuagenarian and octuagenarian memory. And exercising is adding five minutes to every minute that you work out moderately. Well, in that case, like, why are we spending so much time, like, angsting over that martini that we love and that we want to share with a friend? It's completely wasted time. And again, we're only here, like, alive for, like, a blink of an eye. And this idea that you should play the game of life just to increase the odds that you make it to 97 by an extra like two percentage points rather than enjoy the first 95 years of your life in general, that strikes me as like completely crazy. It's like misunderstanding the game entirely. It's like playing a card game or playing a game of like pickup football to make the game last the longest. That's not what those games are about. It's not just about lasting the longest, but having the most fun while you're here. And so I'm a huge advocate of people who are really, really interested in health optimizing, as we call it. It's not just focus on the things that the optimizers tend to focus on the most, like eliminating absolutely everything that can possibly hurt us and maximizing everything that we can put a number to, but to remember that socializing tends to be good for our memory, socializing tends to be good for longevity, and drinking moderately has such a moderate effect on our lifespan that if you work out just a little bit during a week, you're absolutely, or almost certainly, wiping away that risk to our long-term

longevity. I find that, you know, we're talking about young people and antisocial. Granted, people have to be cognizant of the addiction in their family. You know, we open to feedback if anyone tells you it's getting in the way of your life. But I worry that.

young people aren't drinking enough and that the anti-alcohol movement is actually on the whole damaging, that the risks to a 25-year-old liver of alcohol are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation. And one idea that I love is that if there are four men or four people under the age of 20 between 18 and 21 are together, they should be allowed to drink in a bar. The 18 to 21-year olds, it strikes me, aren't being as social. That's when their brains are being wired. I find that men generally, and this again is Jimmy Carr, check each other, that when they're in their groups, they actually behave better and they give each other a hard time or shame each other when they do stupid shit. It's when they're alone that they get really reckless. Let me put this forward. Lower the drinking age to 18 in the United States. Your thoughts? I don't know.

I haven't thought about it. I haven't thought about changing that law to fix the problem, But I love the idea of having a law that is elastic, given how many people are coming up to the bar. Like if people come together, that there's an exception that's being made, that's a very clever idea. to essentially have a law that is therefore directly encouraging socialization by encouraging or by prohibiting solo drinking at certain ages, but allowing social drinking. Because what you're essentially saying with the law that you're proposing is that we are banning solo drinking from 18 to 21, right? Like that's really what the law is, because what you're doing is you're allowing social drinking between 18 and 21. It's a clever way of doing it. I wanted to go back. I just went back to the piece that I wrote about the latest research on moderate drinking. This is an article on my sub stack called, Is This the End of Booze? And here's what the numbers say, according to the most recent highest quality government survey. At six drinks a week, so about one drink a day, it's hard for scientists to show any lifetime mortality risk. It basically doesn't appear. At nine drinks a week, a person incurs the lifetime mortality risk that is essentially the equivalent of driving for a lifetime. So this is a risk that is real, but one that practically everybody lives with, right? At 12 drinks a week, the alcohol habit becomes twice as dangerous as driving. And at 14 drinks a week, which is two martinis a day, you know, two big drinks a day, you should think of yourself essentially as the same lifetime risk as being a logger, which is the most dangerous job in America. There's a big difference between moderate drinking and, you know, having two drinks every single day, every single week for your entire life. The former, it's hard for observational studies to show practically any lifetime mortality risk. The latter, right, 14 drinks every single week until you die, that is the equivalent of the most dangerous job in America, which suggests that it's probably the riskiest habit you will develop unless you are essentially a chain smoker. So the amount matters, right? This is something that has to be done in moderation. And alcohol itself is a delicious, moderate poison. I mean, our livers evolved to handle ethanol specifically. And there's an interesting theory here. It's called the drunk monkey hypothesis. This is real. And the drunk monkey hypothesis essentially says that, you know, some tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, some common ancestor of all human beings suffered catastrophic climate change such that these monkeys couldn't eat the fruit that was in the trees because all those trees

were dying. And instead they moved out of the trees and they were eating fruit that fell on the ground. That fruit that fell on the ground had started to decay and become alcoholic. And so their livers had to evolve to be naturally selected to handle that little amount of ethanol that had developed on this rotting ground fruit. And so it's possible that hundreds of years, hundreds of millions of years ago, climate change created an enzyme mutation in our livers that could handle moderate amounts of alcohol, but it is moderate. And our livers do a terrible job of handling too much of it. So I think it's very important to say, and I'm glad that you triggered this, that while I think it's very hard to show a relationship between moderate drinking and lifetime mortality risk, it is not hard at all to show a relationship between heavy drinking and lifetime mortality risk. But the bottom line that I think you're getting at here is that life is full of risks, and there's no door in the imaginary vestibule of life that you can walk into behind which there are no risks. If you decide that you're not going to take any risks and be inside your room all the time, well, then you're never going to work out. You're never going to meet a mate. You're never going to have friends.

all those things are terrible for you. If instead you drive to the bar sometimes or drive to your job, well, commuting, of course, has a risk. So leaving your home immediately incurs some risks. Drinking, yes, has a risk. Not drinking and socializing less, that has enormous risks too. So rather than delude ourselves with the idea that there exists a door behind which is the riskless life, we should have the more rational idea that every door in that vestibule has risks behind it. You choose your own risks and you moderate those risks relative to other risks based on, you know, what makes you feel good, what is healthy, and what, you know, brings life to your community. But this idea that there exists the door without risks, that's just a myth.

We'll be right back.

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My name is Sean Wallenson. I'm the owner of World Link Sporting Club in Brooklyn, New York. The best thing about watching soccer is it's continuous. You never know what's going to happen or when it's going to happen. It's important to have the place you go to watch soccer because of the camaraderie you build with everyone else, with the bartenders, with the staff, with the

other people who come to the bar. The community here at Roeblink Sporting Club, it's unlike any other sports bar that I've found in New York or in Brooklyn or anywhere really. Like you might not know anybody when you walk in, but you definitely are going to know people when you leave.

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one two three i'm stand-up comedian john marco cerezi and i'm actor penis model russell daniels the downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are because let's face it things are not getting better every episode we talk about what's wrong with our lives our guests lives the world but in a fun way bottom line is you're gonna walk away feeling better about your life we've had so many cool guests caleb here on busy phillips stavros halkius laverne cox hassan piker alana glazer i promise you're gonna have a good time now on the vox media podcast network this is the downside

we're back with more from derek thompson so switching gears before we go to before we go to the questions here, I'd love to get your take on the rise of the DSA and the newfound popularity or surge in socialism, although I would argue that word is being misused right now. Specifically, it feels as if democratic socialism has become an identity among educated young professionals, but much less so across the working class it describes itself as representing. What do you think accounts for this gap?

So I think what we're seeing is a story that is very generational. And I think the fact that it's a cohort story and a generational story is almost always underexplained in analyses. I remember I graduated from college in 2008, and I started writing for The Atlantic in 2009, and I was writing a lot about the economy in the early 2010s through Occupy Wall Street.

And after Occupy, which I think was 2011, it became very clear to me that my generation was comfortable with the self-identity of socialism and the word socialism in a way that I myself was not and that previous generations were not. Millennials, especially geriatric millennials like me, I'm 40, born in the mid-80s, let's say mid-80s through early 90s. In some part because of the Great Recession, but also I think because this was a highly educated generation that was extremely disappointed by the economic opportunities made available to people with college degrees, became very comfortable with the self-identity of socialism and with ideas that touched socialism. And that comfort continued during the Obama years when there was a lot of frustration that Obama couldn't move the country further enough toward universal health care and other socialist causes. Those people aren't 22 anymore. They're 40. The average age of an American today is 39.7 years old. Millennials are in their late 30s and 40s, which means that rather than represent a tiny share of the electorate when their average age was 22, they represent a much larger share of the electorate, especially in cities. And so it's not surprising to me from a mere generational perspective that a millennial generation that has for almost 20 years been significantly more socialist than older generations, or maybe even the rest of the country, that as they become a larger share of the electorate and especially a larger share of the urban electorate are voting for socialists in, you know, the Los Angeles mayor primary, New York City, Washington, D.C., The mayor of Seattle is DSA, the DSA candidates from New York that Mamdani endorsed, and that we're seeing this rise to the DSA in urban America specifically, where a lot of geriatric millennials like myself live. I'm speaking to you from Washington, D.C. So from a geographical perspective and a generational perspective, I think you can get a lot of explanatory power just looking at generations and geography. That said, I also think there's something really important about the fact that the establishment Democratic class has absolutely no juice, like whatsoever. I mean, no energy whatsoever. When Abundance came out, I think one of the reasons that it was grabbed onto by especially a lot of people in the center-left is that there needed to be a critique of the establishment that came from the center-left that wasn't just a defense of the establishment, right? I think too much of these, maybe Clinton, Biden, Harris, too much of that sort of cloud of ideology defended the status quo and defended the establishment rather than criticize it. And what any successful politician needs today is to represent themselves

as coming from outside of the system to change the system because Americans fucking hate the system. And so if your first message as Kamala Harris or someone like her is they wouldn't change anything that Joe Biden or anything that the incumbent, the establishment is doing, I think you're dead in the water. So you need a critique. And it's very easy to make a critique if you are, as the DSA is, a faction within the Democratic Party that has always had an antagonistic relationship with the party with which they caucus. And so the fact that the DSA can therefore represent itself as a fighting brand within the coalition that's incredibly important and powerful. And liberals, abundance liberals, centrist liberals, maybe like me, I think that they need a clearer message of critique of the system that doesn't just sound like we want to just futz with some ideas at the margins and we basically think the establishment is good. We need to clarify our critique just as well as the DSA has.

Let's get to a couple questions. Is centrism sustainable? Do the algorithms encourage people to go to the polls? And is there a place or a home for centrists that still exists in America?

Hard to say that centrism is dead considering that the last Democratic president was Joe Biden. Um, you know, phones existed in, in 2020, um, phones existed in 2019 when he was leading in the primary, perhaps the entire time, except for this few months when Bernie Sanders was up. Um, I think that centrism, the popularity of what is sometimes called centrism might be underrepresented in digital spaces. Um, but that doesn't mean that, um, what some people call centrism is dead with, um, I understand where the question is coming from. I sometimes find it like a little bit difficult to talk about centrism.

and, you know, moderation is like a clear set of ideas. Like sometimes centrism is like a policy set and sometimes it's a vibe. Like sometimes centrism is not saying the word socialism or like whatever, like not saying the word genocide. And sometimes centralism is a set of policies like, you know, removing aid from Israel but not calling it a genocide or it's wanting to tax the rich

universal health care, but don't take over companies. Sure. Universal health care,

but private enterprise is, is still good. Um, you know, and so it, I, I sometimes prefer to use slightly more specific language. Like I don't, I don't feel any compulsion around like defining my own politics. I am a classic liberal who is what has sometimes been called like a welfare capitalist, I think free enterprise solves problems very effectively and that the government should typically not do what the private sector is already doing well. But there's lots of things the private sector doesn't do well. Basic research is very difficult for the private sector because basic research creates knowledge that anybody can build a company off of. And so what you want is like a large set of public truths that are discovered by scientists that individual companies can then use to turn into enterprises that are sold to consumers. Well, that speaks of a world where you want incredibly ample research budgets for scientists to discover truths about the cosmos and the human body, but then you also want private equity, excuse me, not private equity, private enterprise unleashed in a way that allows them to build products off of that set of knowledge. I think capitalism is good, but I also tend to want higher taxes on the rich than most people who might call themselves a capitalist, and I want more of that distributed to the low income and especially to children maybe than most people who call themselves a capitalist because I think it's a moral horror that you have millions of children living in poverty in the richest country in the history of the world. So I think there's lots of ways to balance deep care for the poor with an appreciation for the fact that many things that are necessary and important, like say houses, are not going to be built exclusively by the federal government. There's no space in the budget for that, look at our deficits, look at our interest rates. The year is not 1933. The unemployment rate isn't 35% and we don't have basically a balanced budget. And so if all of our ideas are simply going to try to recapitulate like an FDR approach to the economy of moving everything into the public sector, that completely misunderstands the macroeconomic and financial realities of 2026 by mistaking them for the very, very different realities of a broken, broken economy in the 1930s where you had all of this lax labor market that could be deployed to, you know, build theaters and bridges. So in sum, I am someone who believes in free enterprise and also believes that one of the biggest problems with government today is the lack of urgency

around helping the poor. Yeah, it feels as if we need new words. And that is, I don't think people recognize the actual meaning of socialism. And if you ask them where it's worked, they point to Northern Europe. And I would argue that in many ways, Northern Europe right now is more capitalist

than we are. Look at their business regulations. It's quite easy to start a business in a lot of those Nordic countries. And so from a pure Marxist standpoint, they're doing a very bad job of making it difficult for some free enterprise to get off the ground. And I think a lot of times

what people mean when they say socialism is that they want some form of compassionate capitalism and a recognition that capitalism can't work unless you feed the middle class. And at some point we have to recognize that the middle class is not a self-occurring organism and requires investment. And we have this weird socialism on the right where the president thinks he can take a stake in a chip company or a steel company. And then on the left, they think of socialism, I would argue, as just having a stronger social safety net, which I think is a key component of robust capitalism. So we have time for one more listener question. A listener asked, and this is a good one, regarding the loneliness epidemic, how can a man approach a woman in a way that feels welcome rather than intrusive? you're now a dating coach

yeah this is good let me say first just to put a bit of a bow on the last answer that you gave about capitalism and socialism I'm working on this myself that I think that sometimes antipathy toward billionaires antipathy toward a perceived oligarchy can manifest as antipathy toward markets and that's where I want to get off the train because in so many cases, let's look at housing. The reason that California, say, isn't building housing doesn't have to do directly with the number of billionaires who live in California. It has to do with the fact that in too many cities where people want to live and move to, we have broken the market signals. We've broken the markets for housing by making it impossible for supply to meet demand. And so there's some ways in which what is sometimes called the needs of what is sometimes now called the working class, the needs of the middle class and low-income people, are sometimes better met by markets than they are from the mere enlargement of government. And seeing where we need more markets and where we need more government, that clarity is not provided by the word socialism or by the word oligarchy. That clarity requires actually understanding what problem you're trying to fix and what tools actually fix that problem. So I just wanted to say that.

Well, you wrote a book on this. You and Ezra wrote a book on this on abundance, which if anyone is interested in doing a deep dive in housing and the issues facing us in America should absolutely read it. Talk to me again.

So hard pivot. Let me think of three guidelines for how to date. First off, full disclosure, I was pretty single for most of my 20s, met my wife when I was 29 on Bumble. and the rest is history. So one, get out of your room. The first half of the 20th century was about Americans mastering the physical world and the second half or the first half of the 21st century has been about escaping the physical world by moving into our rooms. And that's bad. We become comfortable taking risks on our phones and uncomfortable taking risks in the real world and we should be more comfortable taking the moderate social risk of going out and meeting people and making friends. And that's my on-ramp to number two, I suppose. So one is leave your room. Two is make friends. Practice making friends. Belong to large social groups that include women so that you get to know women as people and not just as potential mates. Because I think if you shut yourself off from social groups that include women and only think of women as these strange creatures that you see at bars, but you never speak to them unless you are trying to get their number, then you won't understand how to be friends with them and they won't want to spend time with you because having a partner, having a lover is also about having a friend. And so number one, get out of your room and number two, make friends.

Or introduce you to their friends.

Exactly, yeah. Or build social groups that include both men and women again so that you feel comfortable talking to women rather than feeling like it's this incredibly aberrant behavior where like you've left your room and like given yourself a self-talk in the mirror that's like, today I'm going to talk to a woman. Well, that's putting this experience on like such an insane pedestal. Like learn how to make friends. One, leave your room to make friends three um like what's the cliche about about uh being a good conversationalist it's something like to be interesting be interested i love that idea i i love that

i love that comedians think that the sexiest thing uh for women and or in their eyes is follow-up

questions you know what and that and that clicks into something i was going to say which is that I don't think that journalists have it good in every single respect. But one really nice thing about being a reporter, about being a real journalist, is that your entire life is asking questions of strangers because you are interested in their lives and work. And in that way, being a journalist is sensational training for dating. Because what a first date is, is a kind of reporting project. If you see it just as a like sex project, like this is just about getting this woman into bed with me, I think you're far less likely to succeed than if you think of it as a project by which you're trying to understand what makes them interesting and what is interesting to them. This is just what reporters do. You call up someone on the phone. You've never met them before. You ask them questions about their work. You say, I'm sorry, I don't understand that. You say, is this summary of what you just said an accurate reflection of what you're trying to tell me? You say, wait, tell me more about that. Wait, that's so interesting. I didn't even think about my project going in that direction. Tell me more about that. This is just good conversational tactics. And so, I don't know, maybe the Columbia Journalism School should like, you know, publish some like guidebook to dating because in many ways, I think like some of the best questions on first dates are the same good questions that are like, you know, talk to journalists.

on day one. So yeah, to be interesting, be interested would be number three. Get out of your room, make friends, and be interested. Derek Thompson is one of the sharpest voices

in media and politics. He's the co-author of Abundance, the host of the Plain English podcast, and writes on Substack about culture, tech, and economy. And also, Derek's sort of a pioneer in that he had these very important seats at the Atlantic and other kind of iconic institutions and took the leap on the Substack and is kind of, you know, quite frankly, is a prime example of where the creator economy works. I think we immediately started benchmarking your Substack. We should have you back on just to talk about the business model and how you've been able to, because you left what is considered at a young age. I get called from a lot of people in your seat who are leaving at 65, and I don't know if they're leaving or they're being pushed out, but your career was on the rise on these traditional paths and you purposely took an off ramp into a riskier path and you're showing that it actually was speaking of risk a really good risk so Derek thanks so much for joining us and congrats on all your good work and also a quick shout out subscribe to the PropG Plus program at propgmedia.com and if you're not already reading Derek's work check out his sub stack which we'll link in the show notes below thanks everybody Thanks, guys. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janair. Kami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from Prop G Media.

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Let's go.

What do you got here?

My name is Sean Wallenson. I'm the owner of Roeblink Sporting Club in Brooklyn, New York. The best thing about watching soccer is it's continuous. You never know what's going to happen or when it's going to happen. It's important to have the place you go to watch soccer because of the camaraderie you build with everyone else, with the bartenders, with the staff, with the other people who come to the bar.

The community here at Roeblink Sporting Club, it's unlike any other sports bar that I've found in New York or in Brooklyn or anywhere really. Like, you might not know anybody when you walk in, but you definitely are going to know people when you leave.

The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world. You need a reliable network to make sure you can manage all of those different games at different time zones throughout the day. Verizon Business keeps things moving.

Verizon Business helps make sure every small business wins. As a proud sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 2026, Verizon supports the drive, resilience and ambition that fuels small business owners. Learn how you can strengthen your business at Verizon.com slash business.