Derek Thompson
speaker
564 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Derek Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · The Week: China Is Undercutting America’s AI Boom · 24 Jul 2026
podcast
I think of it as almost a clean transference of the risk impulse outside of one's home or room toward the risk impulse being entirely cultivated and spent, so to speak, inside of one's room.
And I mean, I'm obsessed with this phenomenon, and there's a bunch of different places to take it.
I remember in that...
At the end of that essay about monks in the casino, I'm really initiated in this inversion of risk where I think I was talking to someone about this phenomenon and they said, you know, the sociologist, the early 20th century sociologist, Max Weber, had this idea that it was Christianity that gave birth to capitalism and Christian asceticism in particular, this idea that Puritans wanted to save money
that could then be pooled, and then that pooled saved money, could be used to be invested in other enterprises, and that was the foundation of capitalism.
But in a way, what we're seeing now is an entire inversion of that principle, because it is capitalism that is giving birth to a kind of wretched asceticism.
That is to say, the casino economy is turning our young people into monks.
And that's an unbelievably strange and fascinating phenomenon to me.
And again, it's not just fascinating.
I think it is fundamentally sad.
It is fundamentally sad even if you like gambling, even if you think the calci is like the most interesting and wonderful invention in the last 20 years.
It's sad to me.
Because the research that we have says so strongly that we tend to overvalue and over-demand solitude when we are given solitude as an opportunity.
Life isn't just Netflix and work.
Life is often tragedy.
Life is often losing a job, losing a parent, dealing with a mental health crisis.
And in those moments, not having a social group to fall back on, that is the real risk.
It's interesting, you mentioned two things in your windup.
You mentioned socialization and you mentioned vaccines.
And there's a way in which those ideas connect in a weird way.
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