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's on the individual level.
I think we're locking ourselves out of real joy in a very finite life.
More broadly, there's some really interesting research that's come out of Denmark on politics.
And the fact that men in particular who self-identify as being more socially isolated tend to not experience politics as something that affects or touches their community, but rather something that they see as kind of entertainment.
And the word or the phrase that has been used to describe their approach to politics is
is need for chaos.
They have a higher need for chaos.
What they want is not politics and policy that solves the world, that fixes the world.
What they prefer is politics that is chaotic for its own good.
And so I think that a world with more and more solitude is not only going to make us sadder in our finite light of consciousness on this earth, but also it's going to make politics much worse, and that's going to make the world worse as well.
Well, the mental impact is very close to what you've already described.
At a psychological level, feeling disconnected from the world, feeling disconnected from other people makes you disconnected in a long run that's really bad.
Because I think that friendship, you know, we sometimes think about making friends as something that's just like going out for lunch, like an activity that exists in like single units.
But friendship is more like a muscle that you build.
In many cases, it can take tens, dozens of hours just spending time with another person.
to truly form a deep relationship with them.
And so if you lock yourself out of that, if you say, I'm going to have fewer friends and I'm going to spend less time with them, which is something we absolutely see among Gen Z. They have the fewest number of friends of any generation that's been studied in the last few decades.
Where is that really going to cost them?
People who are isolated like this, they might not feel like it costs them so much on a typical Tuesday or Wednesday.
They wake up, they maybe do a workout, they go to work, they come home, they gamble a little bit on Kalshi, they watch some Netflix, they go to sleep.
Showing 141–160 of 564 · page 8 of 29
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