Derek Thompson

People are around each other much less.

They're socializing less.

Rates of partying, I just wrote a big piece about this, have been plummeting in the last few years.

There's way fewer people hosting or attending social gatherings than there used to be even two decades ago.

In that context-

This finding seems critical to me.

And not to put you in the role of being a public health advisor here, although feel free to play that role if you want, do you think studies like this might have public health implications?

If we're interested in advancing a thesis that social connection can provide cognitive protection, that's a very strong claim.

And I think we do want to be clear that we're picking up on the right, say, causality from your research, right?

It's possible, on the one hand, that the things that create brain health also allow people to socialize.

And it's also possible that socializing has the effect of improving brain health, right?

So I guess I want to know, what's the measure that you used here in trying to assess socializing?

Is it the number of friends people have, the amount of time they hung out, or some other general measure of social connection?

Let's talk about the next 10, 20 years.

You've been looking at these folks, uh, hundreds of people in the super rager study.

Now for two decades, you have this big splashy study.

What's next.

What's the next question that you want to answer in this space?

Dr. Weintraub, thank you very much.

Hi everybody, Derek here.