Derek Thompson

You look at advertising for the 1940s, 1950s.

It's incredibly, it seems incredibly reactionary today.

But this idea that the highest expression of being a woman in America was being a housewife

or this incredibly popular notion that you should, of course, have two, three, four kids.

This is what a good American household does, just seems to have emerged and then was quelched in the 1960s, 1970s.

I'm so interested in how these things happen, right?

How these paroxysms of cultural revolutions happen.

And it seems to me like we're in the middle of one right now with a smartphone.

where the evidence is just so clear that it's changing our mental health, it's changing our ability to focus, it's changing our test scores in verbal and mathematics.

It might even, to your point, be changing our personality, making us less conscientious, less agreeable, less extroverted.

But these things are very, very, very hard to turn around.

And so that's why I'm glad that you're out there like popularizing the potential risks of the way that we're living.

Because I do think that's how it has to start, right?

The flood has to start with a little trickle.

I don't know, any final thoughts on like how one jumpstarts a cultural revolution that takes on a cultural revolution?

Because I do think that is to a certain extent what we're in the middle of.

It's tough.

I like this being a solution show, but values are tricky.

Value change is really tricky.

Some people value reading and some people don't.