Why America Feels So Unhappy — with Derek Thompson

25:55And then, oh, there's a cat video and it's some Neosporin so I don't lose my shit and log off forever. And then it goes back to talking about misogyny and Trump and why this bestseller person is actually an awful person and it's thinly veiled. It just, everything is, let me take the worst angle of everything because I sound smarter and it's a hot take and the algorithm loves the rage baiting and elevates that content. And two, the way our brains work is we don't think, oh, having a hot shower and Novocaine and Netflix makes us the wealthiest person in the world just 100 years ago. It's Derek is at the Aspen Ideas Festival and has a really cool family and a nice life and gets to do what he wants and is wealthy.

26:43And if I'm not Derek Thompson, by the time I'm 30, I'm failing. We don't compare ourselves to people 100 years ago or look at the stats. We compare ourselves to the Instagram version of everyone's life. Those are my, what I see as the drivers of our unhappiness. But I'd be curious, A, do you agree with that? And am I missing things? I wrote an essay a few weeks ago, a few months ago, I guess, at this point, called Everything is Television, about how all of media is assuming the vocabulary of television. A podcast is becoming television and social media is becoming television. And the AI companies, OpenAI, are trying to turn AI into, with things like Sora 2, television.

27:24And as our lives become more intermediated by screens, and as we spend more of our lives looking at the beautiful lives of others, I absolutely believe that as comparison is the thief of joy. If we build machines of comparison, we are going to be stealing from ourselves the joy that we should feel. I think that's part of it. I also think that something you see on social media, in journalism, in podcasts, in online essays, on Reddit, is many people making a kind of simultaneous discovery that negativity juices viewership and sharing metrics more than almost any other emotional valence. And so we're simultaneously, all of us, essentially like we're all like marketing scientists trying to figure out how do I make my message go viral?

28:16How do I make my show go viral? How do I make my clip go viral? And we're all learning around the same time that as the NYU professor Jay Van Babel has shown, Jonathan Haidt has talked about this a lot, negative emotions go viral. Negative words and headlines increase headline sharing. In-group versus out-group frames for ideas tend to increase sharing within certain groups. So if it is the case that we're all essentially participating in these ecosystems where we're learning that the best way to lift ourselves up is to be negative, especially about some other out-group, then of course we're going to find that when we pick up our phones, we're going to live in this kind of stew of negativity.

28:55And that's going to make us feel not only like the only things happening in the world are bad things, but also that the only right posture that we should have toward the world is one in which we seek out enemies to hate and to demonize. So I think that as more of our lives becomes a kind of nonstop pageantry of short form video in which negativity makes ideas go more viral. Of course, we feel more negative about our lives and about the world. And that's on top of the fact that I always want to make sure that I say this as well. There's a lot of bad things happening. Like I do think Trump is absolutely a wannabe fascist.

29:30I do think that lots of things that are happening with AI could seriously threaten jobs or are already threatening the law. There are many, many bad things that are happening, but our ability to find the bad things has improved at the same time that our ability to find the good things, I think, has deteriorated. I also worry, and I'm curious if you've done any analysis here, that many of our adversaries, whether it's the GRU or the CCP, see that as our soft tissue. That, okay, we can't beat them economically or kinetically. Let's just get them hating each other. And these vehicles are just perfect.

30:03Yeah, I don't think Americans need much help in hating each other from the CCP. I think we're very good at doing that. But it's always, I suppose it's possible that they could lend a helping hand to that effort. I was just reminded that in October of last year, I published two articles on my Substack. One article was called, Why AI is a Bubble. The other article was called, Why AI is Not a Bubble. Both of these were interviews with other experts. So it was mostly me providing a platform for someone else's expertise. There's no mystery in your mind or the mind of anyone listening to or watching the show.

30:42Which article got like 7x more traffic? Why AI is a bubble or why AI is not a bubble? Of course, why AI is a bubble is the one that got 7x the traffic. I thought they were equally good. But it is natural that our attention be drawn to that which offers a sense of threat in our environment. And so media makers' ability to catastrophize subjects essentially tickles that ancient instinct to pay attention to threats in your environment. Why this person is dangerous tickles that threat instinct. I think, you know, I've written about this many, many times because I think there's been a lot of studies about negativity bias and because I think lots of people who comment on news biases and say news is biased toward corporations, right?

31:32It's corporate media is biased toward protecting the powerful or media is biased toward the right or media is biased toward the left. When we talk about media bias in order to be smarter media consumers, we often ascribe that biased ideology or corporate versus populism. But the most profound bias in all of news is a bias toward negativity. And so one thing I encourage when I give talks about media literacy or when I write about it is to say, it's not to say that there aren't people that are biased toward the right or left. Of course, there's many people that are biased toward the right or left.

32:00But fundamentally, the most profound bias in all of news media is a bias toward making you think that something that happened or someone who exists is or could cause a catastrophe. That negativity bias really is the beating heart of modern virality. And once you sort of have a nose for that, my hope is that you start to sort of look for vegetables in your media diet when you know that you're eating a lot of highly processed food. With the negativity stuff is the highly processed food. And articles that seek out solutions or point to ways in which the world might be able to be fixed or get better, right, those are the vegetables that people are sometimes, I think, a little bit less eager to consume.

32:45We'll be right back after a quick break.

32:56A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis. And understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't and what's AI. And who is taking these videos and how we're supposed to understand the source feels harder than ever. So this week on The Vergecast, we're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis, how information moves in an AI age, and what it means to make sense of it all. All that, plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok, and more on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.

33:35Support for this show comes from Nutrafol, the number one dermatologist-recommended hair growth supplement brand trusted by over 1.5 million people. Is your hairline changing? That's only natural, but you might find that you're reaching for your baseball cap more than you'd like. Maybe it's time for a comeback with the help of the one that promotes healthier hair from within, Nutrafol. The root causes of hair thinning change over time, and your routine should as well. That's why Nutrafol now offers hair growth supplements tailored to men at every age. Nutrafol men for ages 18 to 49 can help improve hair growth and achieve thicker, fuller hair in 3 to 6 months.

34:07and their new product, Nutrafol Men 50 Plus, is the first and only hair growth product specifically formulated for men 50 and older. Adding Nutrafol to your daily routine is easy. You can order online, no prescription needed. Start Nutrafol today and make the hat optional. Visit Nutrafol.com and enter promo code PROFG for$10 off your first month's subscription and free shipping. Find out why Nutrafol is the best-selling hair growth supplement brand at Nutrafol.com spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L dot com promo code PROFG. That's Nutrafol.com, promo code PropG.

35:05generate compelling cold outreach, quickly summarize long threads, and respond with confidence. Their visual sales pipeline lets you see where every deal is, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next, all in one dashboard. Pipedrive can even tell you exactly where to improve your sales funnel. It's like having a dedicated sales coach built into your CRM. In short, Pipedrive can help you get more leads and grow your business. It's a powerful, simple CRM built by salespeople for salespeople. Join over the 100 ,000 companies already using Pipedrive. No credit card or payment needed. Just head to Pipedrive.com slash Prop G to get started.

35:39That's Pipedrive.com slash Prop G and get started with a 30-day free trial.

35:51Talk about, you and I both share a passion for the potential change because I believe the most important technology is not AI. I think it's GLP-1. And if you ask someone who's on GLP-1 drugs, what's had a bigger impact on your life, GLP-1 or AI, I know what they're going to answer. Talk a little bit about your view on GLP-1 technology. I like calling it a technology, I think because its implications are just that profound. So to back up just a little bit, I think most people are familiar with the story, But we're talking about a drug, GLP-1s, glucagon-like peptide-1 drugs, receptor agonists, that were discovered initially in the most absurd of scientific experiments, right?

36:40Scraping saliva out of the month of a Gila monster, which I think should inspire us to not shut down scientific projects that might seem a little bit kooky from the onset, right? Like, don't shut down the crazy-sounding science projects. They can absolutely change and even save the world. So this is a drug that, of course, many people know was initially developed to fight type 2 diabetes. It was revealed in many patient populations that people were losing significant amounts of weight. It was then studied specifically for its weight loss possibilities. And that really opened the door to the current revolution that most people know about, the GLP-1 revolution.

37:16But I think what people don't appreciate enough is how many benefits seem to come from GLP-1s in ways that at least initially seem to have nothing to do with weight loss. These drugs, for a variety of reasons that I can get into, but I've done a lot of podcasts on this with experts, but I think I myself only understand it a little bit, are extraordinary anti-inflammation drugs. We have GLP-1 receptors throughout our bodies, even in our brains, so that when we take these drugs, they aren't just acting on our gut, they're acting on entire biological systems in us. So they seem to be good for protecting against neurodegenerative disease.

37:58That's being researched right now, and we'll see exactly how good they are at, for example, slowing down symptoms of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But it's being tested for that at the moment. They seem to be very, very good at slowing cardiovascular disease. And this is so interesting. I think this is one of the most interesting things about it. The benefits of GOP-1s for cardiovascular disease seem to take place even before the patient has lost weight. which suggests that the pathway by which GLP-1s are helping us live longer, helping our bodies be healthy, might be a totally separate pathway than the one by which it helps us lose weight.

38:35That's so interesting to me. The way that I think about these drugs is that it's almost like I never played pinball as a kid that often. But you know, like with a pinball, you launch the ball and then it pings around a bunch of these different systems on the board, right? It pings over here and ding-a-ling over here and then wow, wow, wow over here in the left-hand corner. That's what these GLP-1 drugs seem to do. They don't just touch our gut. They touch our brains. They touch our cardiovascular system. They touch other endocrine systems. They seem to be a kind of magical whisperer of moderation for entire biological systems in ways that help us lose weight, reduce arthritis, maybe reduce neurodegenerative disease, reduce cardiovascular disease, and even do some weird things like reduce cravings for certain things that we know we don't want.

39:28Like, for example, or no, we shouldn't want. Like, for example, they seem to reduce gambling addiction and even cigarette addiction. And so the way I would encourage people to think about these drugs is that there's things they do that aren't mysterious, right? They clearly help people with type 2 diabetes. They clearly help people lose double-digit percentage points amounts of weight. But there's this whole landscape of possible ways that they are improving our health. And what's exciting, and I'll end my answer here, what's exciting is that companies like Eli Lilly can tweak these medicines to maybe have more of one effect than the other.

40:04So maybe develop an edition of GLP-1 drugs that work a little bit less on weight loss, but work a little bit more on protecting against cardiovascular disease. So the people who are already thin but might have a genetic predisposition to early heart attacks, then dad, the grandfather, the great grandfather, all, you know, dropped dead at 55 of a heart attack. Now this is a drug that is essentially like a super empowered statin. I think the possibilities here are really, really interesting, but I would encourage people who are interested in this space to not think of this drug as a panacea. Panaceas don't exist, but rather think of it as something that could in the very near future be seen as the solution to a lot of different medical problems.

40:49I find these things just so profoundly game-changing. And when I think of every other technology or medical type, you know, chemotherapy, if you do enough of it, you're going to get cancer 20 or 30 years down the road. It feels like there's almost no free lunch here. And every additional piece of information coming out on these seems to be, oh, here's another positive thing. A technology that tells your brain to eat less ice cream but eat more kale. I mean, how does that even happening? And the way I described it is scaffolding on our instincts. It basically says, all right, your instincts haven't caught up to the industrial production.

41:27We're going to catch your instincts up to industrial production such that you realize you don't need to gorge. You don't need to watch a ton of porn. You don't need to be on social media all day. You don't need to bite your nails. Supposedly 40 % of people on GLP-1s are biting their nails less. You wrote a book with Ezra Klein called Abundance. And I'm thinking a lot about deficit reduction. And every time I do a hard analysis around how we would be able to politically and economically reduce the deficit, it all leads back to one place, and that is reducing health care costs. And for me, reducing health care costs all comes back to one place.

41:58And I want to pitch this idea to you and get your response. We put out—the federal government puts out the world's biggest RFP for GLP-1 drugs and says we need—I don't know. We need a billion doses. Lowest cost wins. My guess is they could get someone to bid pretty low for a billion doses. And then they offer it for free to every household in America. I think that would be the quickest way to reduce health care costs and our deficit. Your thoughts? I have friends in the health care space and in the health tech space who are healthy, who are microdosing on GLP-1 drugs. They consider their work a kind of experiment.

42:39And I've heard positive feedback from that experiment. That said, as you said, there's no free lunch in health, right? It's not like chemotherapy being a great example of it can slow the development of some cancers, but in no way are patients on chemotherapy thinking of that medicine as being a free lunch for themselves. GLP-1s aren't entirely a free lunch either. They do have side effects. They can cause stomach distress. some people don't like the changes that they feel to maybe their dopamine or their hormone composition. Their muscle loss, certainly, right? Sarcopenia for older Americans is a huge problem.

43:22There's no 85-year-old in America who says, God, I wish I had fewer muscles. So we, for older Americans in particular, and if we're interested right now in solving for healthcare spending, want to be, I think, really quite focused on how do we reduce spending, especially on the final years of life. And one question that occurred to me that I don't even know that I have the answer to as you were describing this scenario, right? I had two thoughts as you were describing it. Number one, I don't know about how beneficial full doses of GLP-1s would be for otherwise healthy Americans. I just don't know because of the side effect profile.

43:58And number two, given that a significant amount of Medicare and Medicaid spending happens toward the end of life, how much spending would we be removing by putting people on GLP-1s in a way that might overall extend lifespans by another year and a half? Eventually, people on GLP-1s who are healthy until they're 80 will still potentially get Alzheimer's, cancer. And treating Alzheimer's and cancer, whether it's through medicine or through nursing homes, is incredibly expensive. The significant amount of our health spending goes essentially toward taking someone who's about to die in three months and allowing them to live another six.

44:48I mean, this might sound a little bit, the way that I'm describing it might sound a little, either careless or bloodless some people. But both of my parents died in their 60s of cancer. And so I understand as much as anybody just how valuable to family members those extra six months can be, right? Those tens of thousands of dollars certainly felt worth it to me. But as you said, extended across the entire country, it adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars at a time when And our deficit is increasing quite significantly. So the truth is, I don't know how to make end-of-life care more economically efficient with drugs alone.

45:31I just don't know. So I do think that more use of GLP-1 drugs would improve people's health spans. But I don't know how to solve that ultimate boss problem of making end-of-life care more efficient. And I do think that if we're really serious about reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending for the purpose of the deficit, we have to answer that final question of what do we do about end-of-life care? Yeah, it's a really good point. I would almost bifurcate them. And that is, one is 70 % of Americans are obese and overweight. And unfortunately, there's an economic incentive, whether it's knee replacement firms or hospital complexes or diabetes statins.

46:10There's just a lot of money or plus-size clothing. from this bullshit notion, and I've gotten pushback on this, that plus-size clothing firms want to convince you that you're finding a truth when you're obese. No, you're not. You're finding diabetes. I'm not suggesting we don't have empathy for people and try and solve food deserts and give people the money they need so they can eat more healthfully. But celebrating obesity is not the way to go. I think that's a different—I think trying to reduce the level of obesity, which I believe is a big contributor to the fact we spend twice as much per capita on health care than any other nation.

46:43That's one issue. What you're talking about is, is it good for people and families, but bad for the economy when as people, the unproductive part of their lives economically just get bigger and bigger and bigger relative to the productive part of their lives? And does that mean we either have to extend the working age or do social? I mean, all roads are leading to the same place. We've got to make the last 20, 30, 40 years of your life less expensive for everybody else, right? We've got to figure out a way to either start Social Security at 75 or have retirement accounts for your—or I didn't know your parents had passed in their 60s.

47:20My father just passed in the last—my mom, like your parents, passed in her 60s from cancer. Anyways, we'll come back to that because 60s is so young. But the last year of his life, California actually has this really innovative program where nurses, registered nurses, are given low-interest loans to buy homes if they turn their homes into hospice. Because the hospital is incredibly, not only incredibly expensive, but incredibly dangerous. And my dad lived in a room in this house with a husband and wife, Filipino couple who were nurses, and spent his last year there. And Medicaid covered part of it.

47:58I came up with the rest. It was still expensive, but it was costing me, I think at one point, before my dad went into this facility, I had him in a facility where they had to have round-the-clock care for him at one point. I'm not exaggerating, Derek, and I had a woman show up and hang out with him every day so it wouldn't be lonely. And granted, I have the resources to do that, and I kind of overfilled it. I was spending a quarter of a million dollars a year on my father's end of life. And I realized most people cannot do that, but this one program took it down substantially. but I would almost bifurcate.

48:31There's the obesity problem, which would have a huge impact. And then there's just a reality that old people continue to vote themselves more money. I want to find most of the stuff we're talking about, people can find in your books and your articles. But I think my audience wants to know the real Derek Thompson. I'm curious, to the extent you're comfortable, what is your relationship with substances and GLP-1? Do you macrodose anything? Do you drink alcohol? Do you do edibles? Like, what is your approach? I think of you as being such a thoughtful guy. What is your approach and view on substances?

49:05So my dad was a lawyer who was also a wine journalist. He was a columnist for the Washington Post in the 1980s, and he wrote about wine. He was the first journalist to get access to the White House wine cellar in the second half of the 20th century and wrote a piece about Ronald Reagan bringing wine back to the White House. This is someone for whom wine was as important as almost anything else in his life. So I grew up drinking wine and only wine. I think before I went to college, I had never had vodka. I'd never had tequila. I don't think I had had more than three sips of beer when I turned 18, but I drank wine almost every day with my parents.

49:44So wine's really important to me, and I'm a huge and impossible wine snob. But I also, I love cocktails. I love making cocktails. I love martinis. I love doing weird stuff with Negronis. I really, really like alcohol. I drink moderately. I drink as moderately as I can, given that I really, really like the taste of alcohol. How many drinks a week? This is what, let me go first. As of last year, I was drinking 16 drinks a week. I've tried to cut it down to four to six. How many drinks a week? You know those fucking surveys when you get a physical, how many drinks a week and then you realize you're an alcoholic?

50:15How many drinks a week does Derek Thompson drink? I'd say I have one drink three or four nights a week and two drinks two nights a week uh so i'd say maybe let's say seven or eight drinks a week um and uh i just given my constitution i can't at this stage at 39 almost 40 drink more than two drinks a night without um taking one of these um one of these pills that i found on on instagram ads that you like probiotics it's basically it's basically these postbiotics it's the thing that you take after you have more than two drinks and honestly whether it's um pure placebo effect uh or not it really works so so i use that i yeah so whenever i have more than two drinks a night or even if i have two drinks especially late um i'll take that one other thing that i'll share is that i have an aura ring um and one thing that i learned the first big thing i learned about my aura ring is if i have my martini between five and six thirty I sleep like a baby.

51:14And if I have my martini between 7.30 and 10.30. Your martini between 5 and 6.00. Are you Paul Lynn coming home from a hard day and your wife prepares a martini for you? I love that. My wife is not preparing my martini. The things I do with martinis right now are somewhat torturous, maybe, to the definition of martini. My favorite martini is a Vesper, a drink that Sir Ian Fleming invented in the book of Cina Royale. A Vesper is a dry martini where you split the spirit between gin and vodka. So I split the spirit between gin and vodka. I probably two parts gin, one part vodka. You mix it with some Lille Blanc.

51:54And then what I do that drives some people crazy, but whenever they have my Vesper, they understand my truth. Not only do I slightly rinse the chilled glass with a little bit of absinthe, But I also pour a dollop of tiny little bit of olive oil and a crack of sugar. A crack of sugar. She said that'd be ridiculous. Salt on top. So it is a salted, olive oiled, absinthe rinsed Vesper. And I make myself that drink pretty much every weekday over parent leave. And it certainly made the hours of 6.30 to 8.30 fly by much more enjoyably. But that's my favorite martini. I use edibles when I watch movies.

52:35I love the way that I'm more like, like my brain turns into a perfectly passive screen for especially beautiful, beautiful films. You know, a Denis Villeneuve film or Paul Thomas Anderson film. So I love edibles for big, beautiful movies. I smoke only occasionally these days. And in terms of harder drugs and psychedelics, it's just never been a part of my life. um it's not that i'm so much against them it's just that really for for some of these things it's almost um a roll of the dice for you know who do you live with as a kid or who's your roommate in college or you know who's your roommate after college what's your partner or it's certainly a partner right yeah i just i never really it's it's not so much that i'm like so against the use of cocaine and some big picture i've never really known people that do it and i've never really been close friends with people that do psychedelic drugs so um have never tried those.

53:33And I'm just a martini-loving edible popping Deneva Lenouf fan, I guess. My respect and admiration for you could not get any higher, and it has. I'd love you to respond to the following. I've got a lot of pushback on this, but when I think about the loneliness crisis, you know, everything's a crisis. The loneliness issue, if you will, people, the sex recession, I think young people need to drink more. And I'm not suggesting they ignore addiction in their family or whether or not it's getting in the way of the rest of their lives. But going out with friends, having a couple of drinks, enjoying an edible with your partner, watching a movie, occasionally when you're single, finding an environment with other single people and maybe having a drink to loosen up and develop, you know, what they call liquid courage, that if 24 % of teens are addicted to social media and only 6 % are addicted to pills or alcohol, It says to me that the risk to the 25-year-old liver are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation when you're not drinking.

54:36And some, I think young people should drink more. Your thoughts? I think young people should probably drink a little bit more. A touch more. I think their lives would be made better. Yeah. I don't want to be like just like the cliche of a— A tequila shot? That's not the answer? No, it's like, do I think if the question were posed this way, do I think that the typical 20 something life would be improved with two more single cocktail hangouts with a friend? Yes, absolutely. I think the benefits of that increased sociality far outweigh the demerits of those two cocktails. I think that we're learning a lot, by the way, right now.

55:22We certainly know, we have erased, I think, the fiction that alcohol might be good for you, right? There were those reports, like the 60 Minutes thing about like the French paradox about how, let's be honest, yeah, the glass of wine is like ice cream. Like no one tells themselves that the ice cream is a medicine for their longevity. They eat ice cream because ice cream is damn delicious. I drink red wine because I think red wine is damn delicious, not because I think that it's secretly good for my health. We should have that relationship with booze. Absolutely. But I think we're learning a lot right now about the degree to which sociality and social connection is salubrious, is protective of our health.

56:00I just talked to someone on my podcast last year about how one of the highest indicators of great memory in old age is the degree to which you are keeping up a large network of friends. And that makes sense almost evolutionarily because you can imagine, like, what is memory for? Like, why do you know how the average longevity of Chinese people increased from 47 to 77 in the next few decades? Why does your brain have that capacity? Well, it makes sense because memory serves as our ability to organize the social relationships in our lives, right? That tribe over there is good. That tribe over there is bad.

56:38This guy can help me hunt. That woman can help me, you know, hunt and gather. Memory is for social connection. And maybe, by converse, social connection helps our memory. So I'm a huge advocate of people hanging out more and people getting out of their houses more. I know that can be difficult sometimes. Couches are comfortable. TVs are big. Phones are an incredible black hole of our attentions and energies. But people should absolutely hang out more. Should they risk the possibility of extra hangovers to do it? No. I would say more booze, still minimizing hangovers as you can using your Z-biotics.

57:15But absolutely, sociality, I think, should be thought of as not just something that's fun, but something that's almost like social fitness, right? Like people go to the gym because they know that it's good to press their muscles. It's good to sweat. It's good to be breathless from time to time. You know, zone two, zone three exercises. In the same way, I think we're just coming around to understanding the degree to which being around other people is a kind of social gym. We're doing something to our bodies, to our cardiovascular systems, to our minds that's not only enriching in the moment, but also protecting us for the long run.

57:48And if people need some of my, you know, olive oil, crack of salt, absinthe rinsed Vestry Martini to do it, I'm happy to welcome more people to my Mount Pleasant house in Washington, D.C. to do it. We'll be right back.

58:10Support for the show comes from Fora. Let me ask you this. When your crew is planning a getaway, are you always the one who starts the spreadsheets, the one who researches rentals and plans out the itinerary? Well, did you know you can turn that talent into a side hustle? With Fora, you can. Fora is a modern travel agency built for people who love to plan travel and help others travel as well. As a Fora advisor, you get best-in-class training, powerful booking tech, and a vibrant global community of experts and fellow advisors who share real insider knowledge to help you launch and grow your own travel business.

58:38That's right. With Fora, you can turn your passion for travel into a real business. Every hotel, cruise, or activity you book as a Fora advisor earns you a percentage of the booking costs as a commission. And you can get started by booking trips for people you already know, which knowing you is what you're doing already. Become a Fora advisor today at ForaTravel.com slash ProfG. That's ForaTravel, F-O-R-A, Travel.com slash ProfG. And make sure to tell them we sent you. ForaTravel.com slash ProfG.

59:10Support for the show comes from BetterHelp. It's easy to get down on yourself for thinking that everyone around you has the perfect love life. But the truth is no matter what stage of the relationship journey you're on, from being married to just taking time for yourself, it can always help to talk about it. BetterHelp says therapy can help take some of the pressure off yourself and help you see what you want more clearly. All you need to do is fill out a short questionnaire that helps identify your needs and preferences and BetterHelp matches you with a licensed therapist operating under a strict code of conduct.

59:37After 12 years plus of experience, BetterHelp says they have an industry-leading match fulfillment rate. And if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. With over 30 ,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally. And out of over 1.7 million client reviews, BetterHelp's average rating is a 4.5 out of 5 for a live session. You can sign up and get 10 % off at BetterHelp.com slash PropG. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P, dot com slash PropG.

1:00:32Now you buy it now in the ShopApotheke App. We're back with more from Derek Thompson. Let's switch to AI. You've mentioned that you'll be watching AI as a source of inequality at several levels. What did you mean by that? Well, it started at the highest level, right? I mean, the U.S. economy is not healthy if you take away artificial intelligence. The hiring rate is slowing down. Manufacturing is declining. Blue-collar workforce is in absolute structural decline at the moment, which is certainly ironic given that the Liberation Day tariffs were designed to help the blue-collar economy. Everything that's going gangbusters is going gangbusters in AI, right?

1:01:14The AI companies have had a great few years in the stock market, despite the little wobbles the last few days and weeks. The data center economy is booming. All this construction money has moved from houses and corporate real estate toward data centers. So at the highest level, the AI economy is strong and the non-AI economy is weak. At the next level, at the level of companies, if you look at the stock market, the companies that are closest to artificial intelligence have gained the most in terms of equity value. And the companies that aren't near artificial intelligence have either been stagnating or declining in large part.

1:01:48So at the company level, you have this inequality that AI is creating. And then finally, I think we're going to start to see not just at software companies, but at white collar economies writ large, a gap opening up between workers who understand how to use AI to make themselves more productive and workers who either don't understand AI or for whatever reason are averse to the technology at a kind of constitutional level. So I see AI as being this sort of this machine for generating inequality at the macroeconomic level, at the stock market level and at the labor force level. And that's why I said I think we just need to pay attention to the degree to which AI is going to be like we talk people talk about the K shape economy.

1:02:27Like, imagine that the top line of the K is AI and this downsloping line of the K is everything that's not AI. I see that beginning to happen right now. And it's interesting from a journalistic standpoint, but it's also concerning, I think, from a human standpoint. The thing I find fascinating about your own career, obviously I've been tracking you pretty closely. You're at the Atlantic, but you've started a really robust sub-stack offering. and to a certain extent i think i've referenced you a couple times is what the future of media might look like and that it's not it's not or it's and and that is people will use these traditional platforms for their brand halo for their commitment to excellence they have they actually they do have enterprise value i'm sure the editors that frustrate you sometimes also add a lot of value to your work you know the festivals the infrastructure the fact checking but at the same time, the propulsion, the hunger, the direct-to-consumer, the speed of turnaround of a sub-stack, and also, quite frankly, 70, 80, 90 % of the economic value you create goes to you.

1:03:33Whereas, in most traditional media, I think maybe between 3 % and 10%, depending on who you are and how powerful you are. Rachel Maddow probably gets 100 % of her, because she's in an unusual position. Stephanie Ruhl probably gets 10%. And then most people who appear on MSNBC or CNN get one or 2%. So the ability to go direct to consumer and capture most of that economic value, I think, is actually a plus. I'm curious, talk a little bit about, as transparently as you're willing to be, how you have managed your career as a, I won't call you a creator, but as a journalist and someone who puts out a lot of content.

1:04:14You have a bit of a flywheel. You have books. You have Substack. I imagine, do you do speaking gigs? I imagine you get asked to do speaking gigs. We're sort of in the same business, if you will. And also, you do a podcast, Plain English. Talk to me about the business of your flywheel and how you're managing your own career and what observations you would have about what you got right and what you got wrong. You nailed the way that I think about my work. I sort of have these four pillars. I have my day-to-day or week-to-week writing, which is on Substack and used to be at The Atlantic. I have my podcast, Plain English, with The Ringer, owned by Spotify.

1:04:50I have the books that I write, the last book I wrote being Abundance with Ezra Klein. And then I have my speaking, which I really enjoy doing. Yeah, it's lucrative and that's lovely. Money's cool. But it's also really fun to be flown to places you wouldn't otherwise be and talk to people in other countries, in other industries, get feedback on your work, see other people who you admire. So that's sort of the fourth pillar there. And the way that I think about this work now is it's a little bit like, you know, I used to act before I was a writer. And with acting, you have rehearsals, and then you have dress rehearsals, which are just like a performance.

1:05:32And then you have previews, which are sort of unofficial shows for an audience. Then you have opening night, and then you have the running of the show. And in a way, I've started to think of the flywheel I've created as existing in a kind of similar process or similar evolution. The best podcasts I do, I think, are podcasts where I have a burning question and I still want to learn something. That's a little bit like rehearsals. I have a question about how AI is going to affect the future of the labor force, but I don't have a thesis. So it's great to bring on somebody to be the expert on that platform.

1:06:07And I ask what I hope are intelligent questions, and they give me some answers. Once I feel like I have a thesis to share with the world, that's a great column. So then I'll turn that into a Substack essay. And if I start to find that my Substack essays share a sort of conceptual box, like they did with Abundance, that I thought that there were problems in America that had to be solved by our relearning the art of building things that Americans need and want, then it's time to turn that project into a book. And I'm doing that right now with my work on the antisocial century, the rise of aloneness, and the degree to which aloneness, I think, is reshaping the economy and politics and the lives of people in the 21st century.

1:06:48I just think it's one of the most important social phenomena in the modern world. And then finally, when I publish a book, as you know, people who book speakers are sometimes interested in booking them for an essay that they wrote, maybe interested in booking them for a podcast that they wrote. But books really are the currency of the realm for a reason that I don't entirely know myself. Books, just brief aside, books are such an interesting cultural product because if your book sells a couple hundred thousand copies, it's a massive bestseller. But articles that get a couple hundred thousand views happen every day, and nobody remembers them a couple of months later.

1:07:29If a movie sells a couple hundred thousand, even one million tickets in a year, average movie ticket price right now is maybe like$10.70. It's only$10 million. It's basically what Melania made in its first weekend. It's not that much money. But for some reason, there's something about books where the commercial impact of this medium is so relatively small, but the economy that exists around it, for example, in speaking can be quite significant. So I wonder if you also have that feeling that in the long run, and I don't know how much we should care about the long run, but in the long run, the books last in a way that almost nothing else does.

1:08:10oh yeah the medium is the message i can tell the medium through which someone has discovered my work by the way they approach me if a young dude comes up and high fives me and he's like prop g i've never seen a video if someone comes up to me and starts speaking to me as if they're my friend and i literally have to go if i met this person i know it's a podcast podcast is very intimate familial if someone writes a very long email or comes up to me and says i need to speak to you and literally, like sometimes literally holds my hands, they've read the book. There's something, I don't know if it's because throughout history, only the most educated or religious figures had access to Gutenberg's printing press, that they associate the written work with something timeless and important, but no doubt about it.

1:08:58And also, I have this trick. I always travel with two books. I sign them and I stay at nice places all over the world. I sign them and say, if inclined, please text message me your thoughts, and I put my phone number, and I write it in the front, and I leave the books wherever I go. I'll stay at somewhere. They always have these faux libraries with all these cool books, and I'll always just throw my book in there. I get text messages from people. I read your book. This is what I like. This is what I didn't like. If I'd left a magazine article and said, please contact me, no one's going to pull out a podcast we're doing from 2021 and listen to it again in 2031.

1:09:35But your kids are going to read your books, right? Your grandkids may read your books. So there is an enduring nature, a timeless immortality to books, hands down. So as we wrap up here, I would love, and this is a tactical question, I would love for you to help our listeners get their arms around Substack. You're new to Substack. You've made a big splash on it. And it strikes me as kind of the medium of 2026 almost. I thought it was dying in 23 and 24. And then almost everybody I know started building out their Substack. And, of course, we're doing the same thing. And we're finding it takes a lot of time and energy and a little bit of money to add the features they say they have but they don't actually have.

1:10:18And then to figure out a subscription model, what's in front of the wall, what's behind it. Help people get their arms around Substack. What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? What would you do differently? Substack's been wonderful to me. And, you know, for people who aren't familiar with edit, for people who are not familiar with it at all, it's a newsletter platform. You know, it's relatively easy to go on and create a name for your newsletter and then just start writing. And when you press the publish button, it goes out to everyone who subscribes to the newsletter. And some people subscribe to a free version of the newsletter and some people subscribe to a paid version of the newsletter, which basically just means you can only read the article or the whole article if you pay, say,$8,$10 a month to that writer.

1:11:04I left The Atlantic after about 17 years of working at The Atlantic very happily. You mentioned earlier that some people have complicated relationships with their editor. I'm sorry, you started The Atlantic when you were 22? I started The Atlantic when I was 22, yeah. I was an intern for six months. I was a communications intern. My job was to put together PowerPoints for what kind of websites the Atlantic could start. At 22, I was making bongs out of household items, and you were at the Atlantic. Yeah. Yeah. That's ridiculous. Yeah. I got very, very lucky. It was the only—this is 2008. This is the Great Recession.

1:11:37So it was very difficult to find a job then. I sent out maybe 30 letters to magazines and newspapers, New Yorker, New York, New York Times. certainly if it had the words new and york in them i applied um didn't get a call back from any of them and uh the atlantic was the only one uh that they called me back um i did a brief internage internship at slate as well over the summer but but that was it so i got very lucky left after 17 years loved my 17 years there um and when i left you know i was i was nervous because i thought that if i worked hard enough i could probably earn as much on substack as i did at the atlantic But I was worried that I'd be giving up readership.

1:12:18And one thing that I learned very quickly is that the Substack ecosystem has done a really good job through recommending writers to subscribers to other already popular writers or encouraging young writers to appear on live videos with more established writers on that platform. it was maybe six weeks, eight weeks before the average article that I wrote on Substack was receiving more and sometimes even significantly more audience than my typical article at The Atlantic, which might initially seem completely impossible because The Atlantic is much bigger and certainly more important than my little Substack.

1:12:55But because The Atlantic has a paywall, which limits some people's ability to read the typical Atlantic article, whereas I publish a lot entirely for free. I think I made it easier for more people to read my work. And so I don't feel like I've given up a lot on the reach front. So it's been a really uncomplicated win for me, honestly. I miss my editors. I miss the camaraderie and gossip of a newsroom. But from the standpoint of pure creation, it's unbeatable. I don't think Substack is for everyone in the journalism or Do you have your podcast ad-free or you're just – what's the value proposition and what's your pricing?

1:13:39Yeah. So the – well, the podcast with The Ringer is entirely free and ad-supported. And then the sub-stack is maybe one article that I'll write a week is free and the other article that I'll write is paywall protected. And what I tend to do is I'll put the paywall at a part of the article that is preceded by some kind of cliffhanger. So, for example, the article, Why AI is a Bubble, is going to be an article where I have an interview with someone about why AI is a bubble. And at the moment they're about to explain exactly how that bubble might burst, you put in the paywall and hope that that's going to get some people to pay to read the rest of the article.

1:14:10So I have a kind of cliffhanger strategy. And I'd say – and on a monthly basis, it's$8 a month and$80 a year to subscribe to my work. Do you think that was the right price looking back? Do you think it's going to higher or lower, that's the right price? Yeah, I think it'll probably, I've only been on Substack now for six months, so I think it might require a bit more time to have a really clear sense of what kind of pricing is optimal. I did very little research on this other than just comparing the price of similar Substacks, and that's how I reached the$8 a month offering. But it's been wonderful.

1:14:42From a financial standpoint, it's been great. From a reach standpoint, it's been great. Substack is great for people who want to write. And the truth is that there's some writers who would really prefer to write once every two, three weeks, or even once a month or twice a year. It doesn't mean they're bad. It doesn't mean they're bullshit. It just means that some people have a different metabolism or cadence to their writing. But for people who feel like they literally cannot stop the ideas popping out of their ears, Substack is the best place to be. Yeah, I think it was invented for Heather Cox Richardson.

1:15:11She does 1 ,000 words a day, and my understanding is she's making somewhere between$10 and$15 million a year on Substack. She seems to be doing fine. Yeah, it's my understanding. Yeah, she's doing okay. But it's good. It's like if Heather Cox Richardson is making a bunch of money, that's one of the few people I have absolutely no schadenfreude around. I like more power to her. 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 the economy and is the father of two girls ages two months and two years.

1:15:44You are in the thick of it gets better. It gets better, Derek. I appreciate that. That's better. I appreciate it. This is really fun. I appreciate you talking to us. I appreciate your time, Derek. Congratulations on everything.

1:15:58This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our associate producer is Laura Denaire. Kami Reek is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from Prop G Media.

1:16:19Hey, I'm the Sparfuchs from Sparsim.de. You're a crazy smartphone, but your current Handy-Tarif is a more toxic relationship? Then I have something for you. 60 GB 5G in Vodafone-Netz for only 9 ,99€ per month. With 50€ Wechselbonus surfst you five months gratis. Green Flag Alarm. Make now your old Handy-Tarif and get your new new deal on Sparsim.de. Thank you.