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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · The Week: China Is Undercutting America’s AI Boom · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

You can almost think of socialization as a kind of vaccine against a certain kind of isolating misery.

Like, why do you get a vaccine?

Do you get a vaccine in order to help you when you're at your healthiest?

No, you get a vaccine so that in the worst case, you don't get COVID, measles, rubella, et cetera.

So while I think friendship is delightful in its own intrinsic sense, like I love getting drinks with my friends, I love playing board games with my friends, I love hanging out with my wife, it's also the case that maybe the ultimate pain

payoff of social connection isn't just sharing a martini on a Tuesday night.

It's that moment when your parents die, when your sister won't talk to you, when your boss is being terrible to you, when you've lost your job.

These kind of, you can almost call them moments of social illness.

when what you need is the equivalent of a social vaccine to inoculate you against the inevitable misery that every single person is going to feel in this world, in this life.

So that, to me, is the real cost of not exercising the friendship muscle.

Being with friends is awesome, but when you really, really need people who understand and love you, when you're in those deep moments,

dark moments, that's where the biggest payoff of friendship can come.

And if you haven't been investing in these kind of relationships, then you are entirely on your own at the very moment that you need to be surrounded by love.

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · Inside the Anti-Social Century — with Derek Thompson · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

That's right.

I did a podcast with The Atlantic probably 10 years ago that was called Crazy Genius.

And we had a conversation about the tech giants based around... Yeah.

Was it your first book before?

Yeah.

And so we talked about Amazon and Google.

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