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
that default rates and bankruptcy rates seem to rise in states that admit gambling on phones.
And so you have this incredibly strange phenomenon where people are choosing to be alone and then enter into highly risky behavior
rather than enter into that kind of risky behavior outside of their home, right?
They are introducing themselves to fewer women.
They're trying to make fewer friends.
They're having sex less.
They're driving less.
Everything that requires some amount of gumption
outside of one's room, that is declining.
But everything that involves risk that you can do inside of your room, that is rising.
And so that is the phenomenon of the monk in the casino.
They're not even entering the physical casino.
The casino is perfectly outfitted for their own room.
And that, again, is, of course, what makes them monks.
Yeah, I mean, that's almost exactly the way I think about it.
I think of it as almost a clean transference of the risk impulse outside of one's home or room toward the risk impulse being entirely cultivated and spent, so to speak, inside of one's room.
And I mean, I'm obsessed with this phenomenon and there's a bunch of different places to take it.
I remember at the end of that essay about monks in the casino, I'm really initiated in this inversion of risk where I think I was talking to someone about this phenomenon and they said, you know, the sociologist, the early 20th century sociologist, Max Weber, had this idea that it was Christianity that gave birth to capitalism.
and Christian asceticism in particular, this idea that, you know, Puritans wanted to save money that could then be pooled, and then that pooled saved money could be used to be invested in other enterprises, and that was the foundation of capitalism.
But in a way, what we're seeing now is an entire inversion of that principle because it is capitalism that is giving birth to a kind of wretched asceticism.
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