The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Why America Feels So Unhappy — with Derek Thompson

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Journalist Derek Thompson joins Scott Galloway to examine why Americans feel increasingly unhappy — even as many measures of health, safety, and quality of life improve. They discuss how media incentives and negativity bias distort our perception of reality, why outrage dominates online discourse, and how social comparison and screen-based life erode well-being. Derek also explores the impact of AI on inequality, the promise and limits of GLP-1 drugs, and why progress in technology and health hasn’t translated into greater happiness or connection. Join us in the ‘Resist and Unsubscribe’ movement: https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At participating Canadian restaurants for a limited time. Franks Red Hot is a registered trademark of the French's food company LLC. Episode 382. 382 is the country code from Montenegro. In 1982, Michael Jackson released Thrill What's the difference between Neil Armstrong and Michael Jackson? Well, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and Michael Jackson was a pedophile. Welcome to the 382nd episode of the Prop G-Pod.

What's happening? So the resist and unsubscribe campaign is officially on, or unsubscribe February. Why have we done this? I am sick of heckling from the cheap seats. I have had trouble disassociating from everything that's going on. I can't tell if I'm getting older and more fragile. mentally in some ways I think I'm mentally stronger. Yeah, that's true. I'm mentally stronger. I feel like when something bad happens to me, I'm usually better at realizing that in the moment, everything

seems bigger than it actually is. One of my favorite sayings that's helped me a lot. It's nothing as ever as good or as bad as it seems. So in that way, I'm neurologically or mentally, I think, more resilient. At the same time, politics never used to bother me much. I didn't think about it a whole lot and now I feel like I see or I'm witnessing what feels like a pretty slow descent into fascism and people believe it can't happen here well absolutely it can happen here if you were to look at every society in the West over the last couple of centuries and say what is the most enlightened society would it be the UK probably not would it be China definitely not would it be America maybe but I think most people are most historians on a balance scorecard of

an appreciation for immigrants civil rights the protection of other people no cruel and unusual punishment, an appreciation for the arts, emphasis and investment in academia, democracy. I would bet that most historians would probably say, on average, over the last 200 years, the most progressive enlightened society is and was Germany, except for this 11-year descent into darkness.

And how did this 11-year descent into darkness kick off? Well, in the early 30s, Hitler went to the industrial titans or the captains of industry running manufacturing firms and said, if you don't come out against me or specifically if you support me and my vision around a war machine, you're not only going to make a lot of money, but along the way to fascism, I will destroy the trade unions and you will get wealthier. In other words, a bunch of captains of industry held their nose and ignored the slow burn to fascism in exchange for profits. If that rings a bell, it should. as we see all of these captains of industry, specifically in the AI and tech business, prostrate themselves, absolutely enable this autocrat. And whether it's going to the White House and then texting podcasters that you know that they hate themselves, but they have to do this for shareholders, there is always a good excuse for not doing the right thing, even when it's really difficult. Dan Harris often says that action absorbs anxiety. So I thought,

I'm sick at heckling from the cheap seats. I don't have a lot to lose. I have a bit of a footprint. I have a bit of a platform. So I decided to launch this resistant unsubscribe campaign. Now, what is it? It's not, I'm not advocating for a labor strike. It's not a traditional strike in that sense

that don't show up to work. I don't feel that someone with economic security should be telling other people not to work. I'm also not telling other people to protest. I think that's your own time. What I'm trying to do is create a signal and a framework such that should you decide, that you want to have the maximum impact and voice your concern over the administration's policies

with the least amount of disruption to your life or other people's lives, I think that the secret weapon here is simply put, non-participation, and that is the most radical act in a capitalist society is, in fact, non-participation. Now, killing citizens, killing parents of three kids, killing ICU nurses, this has got to stop and having a mass secret police that is asking for voter rolls. Why are they asking for the voter rolls is unacceptable? And unless you walk this shit back, if a vote to vacate the office after you are impeached, which you will be given that Congress is probably going to flip to Democrats this November,

we would vote to vacate the office. That would put an end of this shit pronto, but there aren't 20 of the 53 Republican senators who are willing to do this. So how do you get the administration to walk back these policies? it's very simple. It's the markets. It's not about ideology. It's about math. And the only time he has walked back these policies is when the 10-year spikes or the S&P goes down. So what can you do? You can resist and unsubscribe. And that's what I am doing. What have I done so far? I unsubscribe from Amazon Prime Plus. Not that hard. I don't use Amazon that much anyways. I am unsubscribing from four of my streaming media platforms. I won't tell you which one I'm keeping, but we had a family

meeting around this. And when I suggested canceling all five, I got that. We are going to smother you in your sleep paid or look for my kids. So we are going from five to one. Yesterday, I canceled my Uber account. And what was interesting is on the way to canceling my Uber account. What comes up is a graphics showing you how much you have used Uber. So I have ordered from Uber eats, I think about 30, 34 times. This is the fun part. I have taken 3,700 Ubers. That means that since I've been on Uber about 10 years, I'm averaging about 350 rides a year. I am spending, hold on, $35,000 a year on Uber. But that is fucking ridiculous, even for someone who is blessed with some economic security like myself. But the point is the following. Slowly but surely, streaming media

platforms, AI platforms try to get huge market penetration by underpricing their product, and then they begin raising the price. The prices on streaming media platforms are up 40 to 60 percent post-COVID. Why, they have consolidated down to a small number of powerful players, specifically Netflix, and now they are raising their prices like crazy. And I would argue that if you took the time to go to unsubscribe February or resist an unsubscribe and looked at all of the companies, and I've bifurcated them into two groups, ground zero, these are the companies that I think are so overvalued and so susceptible to some sort of check. back that we have a lot of power, that if we just slow their subscription growth, the president

is going to get a very strong signal from these individuals and from the markets. That's ground zero. Then there's the blast zone, companies like AT&T or Home Depot or a Palantier or basically the companies that are enterprise rent a car or Hilton that is leasing the cars or renting the cars and providing housing for ICE. These are the companies directly enabling and providing infrastructure for ice. I believe that any significant or even insignificant dent in their subscriber growth or their business will do the following. Our $27 trillion economy is 70% consumer spending. And everything we do or everything the corporate market does, millions of people, billions of dollars, trillions of data points is to get you to increase your spending by 1, 2, 4% a year. And it is almost impossible to resist.

They hit you with the right off for the right moment. So non-participation or canceling, canceling your subscriptions. One, you're going to find you're spending a lot more money than you thought. I found out on the way to unsubscribing that I have three HBO Max accounts. Well, okay, I'm going to go to zero, but at a maximum or at a minimum, I only need one. I don't need three. You're going to find you're spending a lot more money on subscriptions than you thought. I found out I have three different subscriptions to chat GPT.

I've subscribed to different models. Wouldn't you know, they forgot to inform me, and they keep charging me. Do you need two LLMs? No, you probably need just one. Do you need five streaming media platforms? No, you probably just need one. But action does absorb anxiety. I'm enjoying this. I feel good about trying to do something. I'm sick of heckling from the cheapseeds. And if you, too, believe that ICE should not be a masked Secret Service police terrorizing Americans, then it's pretty simple. You don't like and subscribe to this podcast. You resist. and you unsubscribe. www. www. resist and unsubscribe, and then please share on social the streaming media platforms, the tech platforms,

the LLMs you have unsubscribe from. Action absorbs anxiety. Doing things with other people feels really good. The most radical act you can perform in a capitalist society is nothing,

specifically non-participation. Okay, In today's episode, we speak with Derek Thompson, 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 a substack about culture tech and the economy. I really like Derek. I think of myself as someone who discovered Derek, although I think the Atlantic discovered him before me, that I have this fondness, this sort of paternal or fraternal fondness for Derek, and I like promoting his work. I think he's really interesting and he seems like a nice man to me.

Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Derek Thompson. Derek, where does this podcast find you? I am in Washington, D.C. So I don't know, you'll, I'm sure, if you're like me, I'm a narcissist and I listen to all the podcasts I'm on, of course. And you'll hear my intro to you is, I take responsibility for your success. Even though you're not a young man anymore, I like to think that I'm the one that discovered you, even though the Atlantic and a bunch of other people discovered you first. But something you mentioned before you came on was that this is your first interview back from two months of paternity. talk a little bit about that yeah so my second daughter was born on December 3rd one two three

and I have been off for exactly two months today is her her two-month doctor checkup and so this is not just my first day back as a content maker this is my first hour back Scott so I do want to make sure that I pre-apologize to you and all listeners for all of the interticulateness that people are about to hear there are a lot of cobwebs still in my head I'm very proficient right now at filling bottles to exactly their appropriate level to top off a screaming baby. But I am not yet particularly practiced in the year of 2026 at delivering takes. So this is going to be a little bit of like a first pancake, and I really appreciate you allowing me to put it on the grid off here. Does your wife work? She does, yeah. She's still on leave right now. She's extending her leave through March,

but she's a clinical psychologist who works with pregnant women and new families at Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Oh, wow. So a real job. I'm curious after taking two months how you feel about paternity leave. You know, being a new dad is very interesting. This is my second go at it. Because in a way, and I wonder if you agree with this, early fatherhood in the first few weeks, it's a very strange thing in that you are not biologically necessary to the survival of the child, right? you can't produce the thing that he or she needs in order to live. And so your necessity exists to help the kid, to certainly help your wife. I suppose that parents who, when the child can't breastfeed, our second child is being breastfed, when the child can't breastfeed, I suppose if you're making formula,

the father essentially can make formula just as well as the mother. But it's interesting because you were simultaneously so involved, enmeshed in this young human's existence that you love. And also your necessity is like a little bit secondary because you exist really, like your job is to be the perfect life-sustaining deputy to your wife. And I think that, you know,

learning how to play that role is a really interesting experience. And the other thing about, I think, being a parent of a really young baby is I think most relationships in life, especially relationships wherein we use the word love, are really two-way streets. You know, we fall in love with a partner

because of what they give us in terms of their humor and their kindness, their beauty. You know, we love our parents because of, you know, how they treat us and how they don't on us. We love our friends because of maybe our shared commonalities. But babies, like really young babies, I think if we're being very honest about it, they give you very, very little.

I mean, they are very much alive, but in a way they are barely alive. I mean, they cannot see you practically. they live in like a fuzzy haze of senses. And so it's a relationship of love. And I absolutely adore my baby. That feels very much an act of pure giving. Of losing yourself to this new entity in your life

with the understanding that they will begin to give you smiles and language and receptivity in a few months or a few years. But it's a very unique moment, I think, of feeling deep love where love is like a, is an almost like a more pure one-way street, if that makes sense. Does that connect with you as the father of several? Well, I have two boys, and I would agree with you that, and I remind my boys of this, that the love here is mostly one way. I had this conversation with my 15-year-old last night.

I said, tomorrow I want you, I want to have a conversation with you, and I want you to answer what question? You said, what's at that? And I said, what value do you add to this family? We spent a lot of time and money on you. We spent a lot of effort on you. Your parents basically fashion fantasy camp for you. You go to this amazing school where all these really talented people,

spent a lot of time, energy, and expertise to try and make you smarter. I'm like, what value are you adding to this family or back to your school? I want you to think about it and come back. And he came back with a really thoughtful answer. He said, I love everybody. I try to be nice. And I'm going to try and do really well in school. And I'm like, that's enough for me.

If you do those two things, we'll continue the fantasy camp. But going back to newborns, I think dads are mostly a waste of time or space for the first. I'll go much further than two months. I think it's basically the baby is a science experiment, and we're there to be supportive of our partner, who is, you know, obviously instrumental. I find it's become, and this gets to paternity leave. I think there should be mandatory maternity leave because I think the species needs to propagate. I'm not sure there should be mandatory paternity leave. I think it sometimes creates resentment.

I think sometimes it's abused. And so I'm a bit of a capitalist here. I think it's between the company, but I don't know if I immediately default to, oh, the father needs to be there. I'm a bit, I think, more of a 50s dad. I don't even believe men should be in the delivery room. I thought that was so disgusting and unnatural.

I wanted them to bring me a baby with a bone in its hair while I smoked a cigarette. but I'm probably a little boomer here. Let me try to make a defense, maybe even a capitalist defense of paternity leave. Most of the gap between adult, prime age adult, male and female earnings is a motherhood penalty. And so one benefit, one benefit of paternity leave is that it puts men and women on relatively more equal standing.

By lowering the economic standards of the man? by normalizing the idea that both parents take off for certain periods such that the men aren't racing ahead while the women are left at home. I think that in a funny way. Could you flip it, though, and just give families and women money when they have kids as opposed to hitting economic livelihood and lowering both down? That's interesting. I feel like I want to drag on the economists who wrote the last paper that I read in the motherhood penalty here. But my recollection is that what happens is, as you know, within companies and especially with greedy jobs where income rises exponentially to time put into the job, like, say, law firms or maybe even work that we do, in those higher paying industries, the leaps into the C-suite tend to happen in one's early to mid-30s, which for college-educated Americans today are precise of the childbearing years. for young families. And so if you create a scenario where women are taking off three to six months while men take off two weeks, then my expectation is that you would see the income gap

between men and women start to increase again, because I think it's been declining over the last few decades. But the challenge here is, and this goes back to the way that you, you know, amusingly put it, you know, biology has created significant inequalities between men and women when it comes to how our bodies can keep our children alive. But the decisions that we make for society can, I think, make outcomes more equal than biology has inscribed. And I think that we should hope that outcomes are more equal than biology has inscribed here, at least when it comes to final income in one's 40s and 50s. But it's a tough issue. And I would say that, you know, we are as species inscribed with an instinct to procreate,

but we have to also be inscribed with an instinct to parent as well, because if there's no knowledge of, if there's no embedded knowledge of how to parent a helpless, helpless baby, then babies don't survive. And we have that, men have that. And one thing that I've learned and really been surprised to feel as a dad is that typically I consider myself a kind of wire cutter person. If it's like, what suitcase should I buy?

I go to wire cutter to figure out within your time, think is the best suitcase. What pants should I buy? I go to whatever, J. Crew. But as a dad, I feel like an enormous upsurge of instinct for how to parent my child. Even down to ideas of like, I love pretending to be a monster around my two-year-old. No one taught me to be a monster. It comes up in me as if it's the echo of some ancestral instinct from 10,000 years ago. And I love that. I love discovering a new piece of myself in parenting. And so as secondary, I think, as some fathers may feel to the early parenting process, I do think it's really important for us to lean in, both to help our partners and to discover

that part of ourselves that I think really is there to be discovered that is inscribed by evolution and by little genes that are waiting to be acted on by our interactions with our little babies. Let me end with congratulations. I think it's wonderful when people such as yourself, I don't know your wife, decide to have kids. I do think that it's good for the world. I think it's good for you. How old is your first daughter now?

She's two. She's two? Oh, okay. So you're in Vietnam right now. The next few years, you're going to come on podcasts like this and talk about your natural instinct to fathering. It sucks. Just let me, the bad news is it just sucks for the dad.

We pretend to like it. I think dads are full of shit when they say, They like babies. They're awful. Your job is just to make sure mom doesn't lose your shit and get some sleep and keep the baby away from bodies of water. That is literally your only two jobs right now. The only two things you're any good at.

At about two or three, it starts to get less awful. And then by four or five, it almost becomes fun. And it gets better and better. Anyways, there's my parenting advice. It gets less awful every day, Derek. Yeah, there you go. Thank you. So let's bust into the stuff you actually.

write about. You ended 2025 with this great essay about trends and themes you're watching as we headed to 2026. You covered AI, GLP-1s, young people in crisis, our casino economy. First up, I love all of these things. I feel like I'm either parroting you or you're parroting me or we were brothers from another mother. And also the relentless negativity bias we live in. Have any of those is you've had some time off to think about this stuff. What do you think is bearing out? What do you think is turning up? What cards are turning up correct that you predicted

or have they changed or not or manifested in different ways? Give us an update on those things and how you're thinking about them. Yeah, when I think about just, you know, what are the most important trends that are affecting our life in the day-to-day, year-to-year basis? The two most important, I think, in a way,

are the two most obvious. I think Donald Trump and AI are the two most important forces for shaping American life. What's happening with AI, what has happened just in the last few weeks with the debut of Claudecode, I think it's just extraordinary. I mean, there are incredibly well-compensated and talented developers in San Francisco and around the world that now are not writing code. They are not doing their job as they did it for the previous years and decades of their career. They are instructing in plain language, artificial intelligence, to write code for them. And I think the possibility that something like Claude Code does for knowledge work, what it's already done for computer programming, is absolutely a live possibility that we have to consider.

I don't yet know how it's going to change marketing jobs and PR jobs, but maybe one metaphor that can help people understand the impact that I think AI will have on work, even if they aren't involved in or have never even heard of ClaudeCode, is to think about something like Excel. So in the 1960s, 1970s, a tiny share of Americans worked in spreadsheets. Like spreadsheet work was a minuscule share of overall white-collar work. And with the invention of Excel and other digital spreadsheet tools, someone might have predicted that all these spreadsheet jobs would just go away

because like the 5,000 people that were working in spreadsheets would essentially be automated entirely and you would need only five people did the job of 5,000, right? That's one prediction to essentially treat Excel as kind of like what the car did to the horse, just absolutely obliterate the entire labor sector. But instead what happened is that Excel didn't replace all the spreadsheet jobs. Excel turned almost every single white,

collar job into a spreadsheet job, such that today everybody graduates from college. They leave Middlebury. They leave Trinity. They leave University of Michigan. And what do they do on their, you know, their first day of work? They learn how to use Excel. I think that is a useful analog for how claw code and similar tools are going to affect the white collar labor force. I think everybody is going to be working with these tools in the near future. And your ability to be proficient with them is going to really, really affect your ability to not only get that first job, but also advanced in your career. So one thing I'm really looking at a lot is artificial intelligence. And we can hold on that a bit because there's so much more to say about what's going on in that

space. But one more theme that I think is really important to remember and to hold on to is that if you read the news cycle, if you read the newspapers every single day and you mention negativity bias, you are going to be struck, punched in the face with a steady, just whack after whack of terrible thing happening in America and around the world. and our political system is terrible. And so many things that are happening in anything that makes contact with politics right now, I think truly is terrible. But at the same time that we're living in a dark age of politics, I think it's really important to remember that we're living in a golden age of living, which is to say longevity. The homicide rate declined last year by its largest amount on record.

Traffic tests are declining and self-driving cars are going to hasten their decline. Suicides are declining. Drug overdoses are plunging, although from a very very important. very high, high opiates, right, fentanyl. You add to that GLP-1s, which reduced not just obesity, but also cardiovascular disease and maybe even neurodegener disease. This is, Scott, this is the first period on record when murders, violent crimes, traffic deaths, drug overdoses, suicides, and obesity are all declining at the exact same time.

It's the first period in our lives that all these things are happening at the same time. And if the purpose of life is to live, if the purpose of life is to live, to survive through it, then we are living in a kind of golden age. We're living in a golden age of living. And so I think that as many terrible things are happening, and I'm not trying to take away from those terrible things by glossing over them. I'm saying that's column A.

And there's also a column B that we are in a golden age of life. And I pay a lot of attention to my work to what's happening in the space of science and technology and the things that kill us and how we're trying to fix them. One, I think that's really powerful. Even if you look abroad in the last 40 years, the life expectancy in China's gone from 47 to 77. Well, put forward a thesis.

So, okay, why are we so unhappy? I would say it's two things. One, the algorithms won us fighting with each other. I haven't spent a lot of time on TikTok recently. I went back on, and I noticed, I'm being so manipulated into hating everyone and everything. And 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 trombed, 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 Novacan and Netflix makes us the wealthiest person in the world just a hundred 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. And 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 is 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, Open AI are trying to turn AI into with things like SORAT2 television. And 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 a 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, how do I make my show go viral, how do we make my clip go viral? And we're all learning around the same time that as the NYU professor, Jay Van Bavel 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, they were 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. And 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, and 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 want to be fascist. I 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, is deteriorated.

I also worry, 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. Yeah, I don't think Americans need much help in hating each other from the CCP. I think we're very good at doing that on our road.

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 in my substack. One article was called, YAI 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.

Which 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 like tickles that ancient instinct to pay attention to threats in your environment, right? While this person is dangerous tickles that threat instinct. I think, you know, my, what 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?

It's corporate media is biased toward protecting the powerful or media's bias toward the right or media's bias toward the left. When we talk about media bias in order to be smarter media consumers, we often ascribe that bias to 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 for the right or left. Of course, there's many people that are biased toward the right or left. But 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. We'll be right back after a quick break. Did you know that Staples Professional can tailor a custom program to make running your business easy? With a Staples Professional account, you get one vendor, one delivery, and one invoice for all your must-haves. From tech to cleaning supplies and dedicated support from Staples experts who guide you on everything, from product selection and ordering to payment. Join today at staplesprofessional.ca and get expert solutions.

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Join over the 100,000 companies already using PipeDrive. No credit card or payment needed. Just had to PipeDrive.com slash PropG to get started. That's PipeDrive.com slash PropG and get started with a 30-day free trial. Talk 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 GLP1. And if you ask someone who's on GLP1 drugs, what's had a bigger impact on your life?

GLP1 or AI, I know what they're going to answer. Talk a little bit about your view on GLP1 technology. I like calling it a technology, I think because its implications are just that profound. So, you know, to back up just a little bit, I think most people are familiar with the story, but we're talking about a drug, GLP1's, glugon-like peptide-1 drugs,

receptor agonist, that were discovered initially in the most absurd of scientific experiments, right, scraping 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. 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 GLP1 revolution. But I think what people don't appreciate enough is how many benefits seem to come from GLP1s 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 our entire biological systems in us. So they seem to be good for protecting against neurodegenerative disease.

That's being researched right now, and we'll see exactly how good they are, 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 GOP-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. That'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 dingling over here and then wow, wow, wow over here in the left-hand corner.

That's what these GLP1 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. Like, for example, or no, 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, that companies like Eli Lilly can tweak these medicines to maybe have more of one effect than the other. So maybe develop an addition of GOP1 drugs that work a little bit less on weight loss, but work a little bit more on protecting against cardiovascular disease,

so that people who are already thin but might have a genetic predisposition to early heart attacks, then dad, their grandfather, the great-grandfather, all, you know, drop dead at 55 of a heart attack, Now this is a drug that is essentially like a superempowered 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. I 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,

how does that even happening? And it's the way I described as scaffolding on our instincts. It basically says, all right, your instincts haven't caught up to the industrial production. we'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 binding their nails less.

You wrote a book with Ezra Client 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, and 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 GLP1 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 healthcare space and in the health tech space who are healthy, who are

microdosing on GLP1 drugs. They consider their work a kind of experiment, and 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 our patients on chemotherapy thinking of that medicine as being a free lunch for themselves. GOP ones 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.

There'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 health care 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'd be answered 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. And 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? Like eventually, people on GOP-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. I mean, this might sound a little bit, the way that I'm describing it might sound a little

a little 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 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.

I 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. There's just a lot of money or plus size clothing. This bullshit notion, and I've gotten pushback on this, that plus-sized clothing firms want to convince you that you're finding your 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. That'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 social... security at 75 or have retirement accounts for a year. Or I didn't know your parents had passed in

their 60s. My father just passed. And 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.

I 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 around the clock care for him at one point. I'm not exaggerating, Derek. and I had a woman show up and hang out with them 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 there'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 book. in your articles, but I want, 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 in GLP1? Do you microdose 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? So my dad was a lawyer who was also a wine journalist. He was a colonist for, 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 who, 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 more than three sips of beer

when I turned 18, but I drank wine almost every day with my parents. So 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. How many drinks a week is Derek Thompson, right? I'd say I have one drink three or four nights a week and two drinks, two nights a week. So I'd say maybe let's say seven or eight drinks a week. And I, just given my constitution, I can't at this stage at 39, almost 40, drink more than two drinks a night without taking one of the first. of these, one of these pills that I found on, on Instagram ads that you've like,

probiotics, it's basically, it's basically zibiotics, it's the postbiotics, it's the thing that you take after you have more than two drinks. And honestly, whether it's pure placebo effect or not, it really works. So I use that, yeah, so whenever I have more than two drinks in night, or even if I have two drinks, especially late, I'll take that. One of the thing that I'll share is that I have an aura ring. And one thing that I learned, the first big thing I learned by my aura ring is if I have my martini between 5 and 6.30, I sleep like a baby. And if I have my martini between 7.30 and 1030, I'm sorry. Your martini between 5 and 6. 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, are somewhat torturous, maybe to the definition of martini. My favorite martini is a, is a Vesper, a drink, that Sir Ian Fleming invented in the book of Siena Real. 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 lila blanc. And 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 oil, absent, rinsed Vesper. And I make myself that drink pretty much every weekday during an over-parent leave. And it certainly made the hours of 630 to 8.30 fly by much more enjoyably.

But that's my favorite martini. I use edibles when I watch movies. I love the way that I'm more like, my brain turns into a perfectly passive screen for especially beautiful, beautiful films, you know, a Genevill-Lenou 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. It's not that I'm so much against them. It's just that really, for some of these things, it's almost 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 certainly your partner, right. Yeah, I just, I never really, it's not so much that I'm, like, so against the use of cocaine in some big picture. I've never really known people that do it.

And I've never really been close friends with people to do psychedelic drugs. So have never tried those. And I'm just a martini-leven, edible popping Geneva-Lanouf 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, 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 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 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. And 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, more, I don't want to be like, just like the, the cliche of a, of a squish.

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. We 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. I 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 X few decades? Why do you, 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. This 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, you know, risk the possibility of extra hangovers to do it? No, I would say more booze, still minimizing hangovers as you can, using your zbiotics. But 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. And if people need some of my, you know, olive oil, crack of salt, absent-wrenched vespere martini to do it. I'm happy to welcome more people to my Mount Pleasant House in Washington, D.C. to do it. I'll be right back. Support 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,

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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 the highest level, right? I mean, the U.S. economy is not healthy if you take away artificial intelligence. Like 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? The 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.

So 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, and we talk people talk about like the K-shaped economy. Like 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 substack 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 or it's and that is people will use these traditional platforms for their brand halo, for their commitment to excellence.

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 substack. And also, quite frankly, 70, 80, 90% of the economic value you create goes to you.

Whereas at most traditional media, I think maybe between 3% and 10% depending on who you are and how powerful you are. You know, Rachel Maddow probably gets 100% of her, you know, 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 two percent. 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, there's a, you 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 playing 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. I 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,

and 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. So 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. and I ask what I hope we're 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 anti-social 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 21st century.

I 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 world. for a reason that I don't entirely know myself. Like, 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. If a movie sells a couple hundred thousand, even one million tickets in a year, average movie ticket price right now is maybe like $10 and $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 people who you should care about the long run, but in the long run. the books last in a way that almost nothing else does. Oh, 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 in high fives me and he's like, Prop G, I've known who's 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.

And 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 all I 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 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. but 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. It strikes me as kind of

the medium of 2026 almost. I thought it was dying in 23 and 24, and then everybody, 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. And 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? SubSAC's been wonderful to me. And 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 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. I 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 website to the Atlantic to start. At 22, I was making bongs out of household items and you were at the Atlantic. Yeah, yeah, God, that's ridiculous. Yeah, it was, I got very, very lucky. It was the only, this is 2008. This is the Great Recession. So 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 and them, I applied. Didn't get a call back from any of them. And the Atlantic was the only one that they called me back. I did a brief internship at Slate as well over the summer, but that was it. So I got very lucky. Left after 17 years. Loved my 17 years there.

And when I left, you know, 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. And 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 in 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, but 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 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? Yeah, so the, well, the podcast with the ringer is entirely free and ad supported. And then the substack 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 AIA 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. So 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 you got 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. From financial standpoint, it's been great. For 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, they're 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 idea is popping out of their ears, substack is the best place to be. Yeah, I think it was invented for Heather Cox-Ritchards, and she does a thousand 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. 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 shudden Freud around. I'm 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. You are in the thick of it gets better. It gets better, Derek. I appreciate that. I appreciate it. This is really fun. I appreciate your time, Derek.

Congratulations on everything. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our associate producer is Laura Deneer. Camryk is our social producer. Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from Prop G Media.