Derek Thompson

Again, quote, the rise of a wellness industry that is often heavily focused on the self as opposed to being focused on others, end quote.

So small spoiler alert, John, I am working on a piece right now about wellness and exercise.

It's incredibly interesting to me that by all accounts,

exercise rates and the number of people who say they participate in exercise or working out is rising across the population in the US at the same time that socializing is falling.

That's a really interesting juxtaposition.

And I don't wanna say that one is to blame for the other, right?

That like, if someone enjoys running three miles a day, that means they're antisocial.

That's not my claim.

But the juxtaposition is,

of a rising wellness industry and declining sociality.

That is an interesting one.

And I wonder if there's anything that you want to pick up on there.

And exercise is a wonderful thing.

You said physical fitness, you mean social fitness, I suppose, that the exercise industry doesn't talk about, doesn't emphasize the social dynamic of it?

I want to pull in AI here.

I wonder whether the introduction of chatbots to young people's lives will create what I guess you could call conscientiousness polarization, which is too many syllables to ever catch on, but let me unpack it in a second.

So like someone with high conscientiousness might use deep research, ChatGPT, like a personal tutor to make them smarter, to find research they wouldn't otherwise discover.

But I could imagine someone with low conscientiousness using this exact same technology to just write all their essays for them, right?

Essentially to outsource the act of thinking entirely.

So the same technology could interact with people with totally different conscientiousness scores in a way that would deepen that personality trait.