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
But I think the knowledge itself, like the information itself that smoking was clearly connected to cancer, that was its own lever on reducing smoking, right?
People today, even if maybe they choose to smoke, they do so knowing the risk.
They don't need to see or not see an ad for like Camel cigarettes to know what the relationship between smoking and their long-term lung health is.
So a huge part of this for me is just like public awareness.
You mentioned earlier,
in the show that there's now evidence, and I think Kara has pointed to this as well, that social connection seems to correlate really, really strongly with health, with longevity, and in particular, a lot of this research comes out of Northwestern University,
with memory in our 80s and 90s.
It might be the case, in fact, that the reason that memory's original purpose before memorizing abstract ideas and mathematics, that memory's original purpose was social.
It was to keep track in your tribe of who's nice and who's duplicitous.
who's strong and who's trustworthy, right?
Gossip essentially is the original purpose of memory.
And so it makes sense that as we surround ourselves with social connection, we are working out those sort of original sort of gossip muscles that make us better at remembering all sorts of things for work and life.
And so making these connections
giving people a sense of what is actually being lost, making them realize that getting a good night's sleep and working out, eating your vegetables, all that's important, but socializing might be just as important as going to the gym.
Social fitness isn't just a metaphor.
Socializing makes our brains fit.
Teaching people about this, I think, is its own power.
But the other thing that I think cities have to do, and this, again, comes back to abundance, is to invest more in physical infrastructure.
Find ways to build parks.
Find ways to build more homes so that we can allow people to move out
Showing 261–280 of 564 · page 14 of 29
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