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.

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

This is something that has to be done in moderation.

And alcohol itself is a delicious, moderate poison.

I mean, our livers evolved

to handle ethanol specifically.

And there's an interesting theory here.

It's called the drunk monkey hypothesis.

This is real.

And the drunk monkey hypothesis essentially says that some tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, some common ancestor of all human beings suffered catastrophic climate change such that these monkeys couldn't eat the fruit that was in the trees

because all those trees were dying.

And instead they moved out of the trees and they were eating fruit that fell on the ground.

That fruit that fell on the ground had started to decay and become alcoholic.

And so their livers had to evolve to be naturally selected to handle that little amount of ethanol that had developed on this rotting ground fruit.

And so it's possible that hundreds of millions of years ago, climate change created an enzyme mutation in our livers that could handle moderate amounts of alcohol.

but it is moderate, and our livers do a terrible job of handling too much of it.

So I think it's very important to say, and I'm glad that you triggered this, that while I think it's very hard to show a relationship between moderate drinking and lifetime mortality risk, it is not hard at all to show a relationship between heavy drinking and lifetime mortality risk.

But the bottom line that I think you're getting at here

is that life is full of risks and there's no door in the imaginary vestibule of life that you can walk into behind which there are no risks.

If you decide that you're not gonna take any risks and be inside your room all the time, well then you're never going to work out, you're never gonna meet a mate, you're never gonna have friends, all those things are terrible for you.

If instead you drive to the bar sometimes or drive to your job, well, commuting, of course, has a risk.

So leaving your home immediately incurs some risks.

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