Why America Feels So Unhappy — with Derek Thompson

Journalist Derek Thompson joins Scott Galloway to examine why Americans feel increasingly unhappy — even as many measures of health, safety, and quality of life improve. They discuss how media incentives and negativity bias distort our perception of reality, why outrage dominates online discourse, and how social comparison and screen-based life erode well-being. Derek also explores the impact of AI on inequality, the promise and limits of GLP-1 drugs, and why progress in technology and health hasn’t translated into greater happiness or connection. Join us in the ‘Resist and Unsubscribe’ movement: https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Scott Galloway?

  Episode 382. 382 is the country code for Montenegro. In 1982, Michael Jackson released Thriller. What's the difference between Neil Armstrong and Michael Jackson? Well, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and Michael Jackson was a pedophile.

• 1:58Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 382nd episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? So, the Resist and Unsubscribe campaign is officially on, or Unsubscribe February. Why have we done this? I am sick of heckling from the cheap seats. I have had trouble disassociating from everything that's going on. I can't tell if I'm getting older and more fragile mentally. In some ways, I think I'm mentally stronger. Yeah, that's true. I'm mentally stronger. I feel like when something bad happens to me, I'm usually better at realizing that in the moment, everything seems bigger than it actually is. One of my favorite sayings that's helped me a lot is, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems. So in that way, I'm neurologically or mentally, I think, more resilient. At the same time, politics never used to bother me much. I didn't think about it a whole lot.

• 2:42Scott Galloway?

  And now I feel like I see, or I'm witnessing what feels like a pretty slow descent into fascism. And people believe it can't happen here. Well, absolutely, it can't happen here. If you were to look at every society in the West over the last couple of centuries and say, what is the most enlightened society? Would it be the UK? Probably not. Would it be China? Definitely not. Would it be America? Maybe. But I think most people, or most historians, on a balanced scorecard of an appreciation for immigrants, civil rights, the protection of other people, no cruel and unusual punishment, an appreciation for the arts, emphasis and investment in academia, democracy. I would bet that most historians would probably say,

• 3:25Scott Galloway?

  on average, over the last 200 years, the most progressive enlightened society is and was Germany, except for this 11-year descent into darkness. And how did this 11-year descent into darkness kick off? Well, in the early 30s, Hitler went to the industrial titans, or the captains of industry, running manufacturing firms, and said, if you don't come out against me, or specifically, if you support me and my vision around a war machine, you're not only going to make a lot of money, but along the way to fascism, I will destroy the trade unions and you will get wealthier. In other words, a bunch of captains of industry held their nose and ignored the slow burn to fascism in exchange for profits. If that rings a bell,

• 4:07Scott Galloway?

  it should, as we see all of these captains of industry, specifically in the AI and tech business, prostrate themselves, absolutely enable this autocrat.

• 4:20Scott Galloway?

  And whether it's going to the White House and then texting podcasters that you know that they hate themselves, but they have to do this for shareholders, there is always a good excuse for not doing the right thing, even when it's really difficult. Dan Harris often says that action absorbs anxiety. So I thought, I'm sick of heckling from the cheap seats. I don't have a lot to lose. I have a bit of a footprint, I have a bit of a platform. So I decided to launch this resist and unsubscribe campaign. Now, what is it? It's not, I'm not advocating for a labor strike. It's not a traditional strike in the sense that don't show up to work. I don't feel that someone with economic security should be telling other people not to work. I'm also not telling other people to protest. I think that's your own time.

• 5:04Scott Galloway?

  What I'm trying to do is create a signal and a framework such that should you decide that you want to have the maximum impact and voice your concern over the administration's policies with the least amount of disruption to your life or other people's lives? I think that the secret weapon here is simply put, nonparticipation. And that is the most radical act in a capitalist society is, in fact, nonparticipation. Now, killing citizens, killing, killing parents of three kids, killing ICU nurses, this has got to stop. And having a mass secret police that is asking for voter rolls. Why are they asking for the voter rolls is unacceptable. And unless you walk this shit back, if a vote to vacate the office after you are impeached,

• 5:48Scott Galloway?

  which you will be, given that Congress is probably going to flip to Democrats this November, we would vote to vacate the office. That would put an end to this shit pronto. But there aren't 20 of the 53 Republican senators who are willing to do this. So how do you get the administration to walk back these policies? It's very simple. It's the markets. It's not about ideology, it's about math. And the only time he has walked back these policies is when the tenure spikes or the S and P goes down. So what can you do? You can resist and unsubscribe. And that's what I am doing. What have I done so far? I unsubscribed from Amazon Prime Plus. Not that hard. I don't use Amazon that much anyways. I am unsubscribing from four of my streaming media platforms.

• 6:33Scott Galloway?

  I won't tell you which one I'm keeping, but we had a family meeting around this. And when I suggested canceling all five, I got that we are going to smother you in your sleep, paid or look for my kids. We are going from five to one. Yesterday. I canceled my Uber account. And what was interesting is on the way to canceling my Uber account, what comes up is a graphic showing you how much you have used Uber. So I have ordered from Uber Eats, I think about 30, 34 times. And this is the fun part. I have taken 3,700 Ubers. That means that since I've been on Uber about 10 years, I'm averaging about 350 rides a year. I am spending, hold on, $35,000 a year on Uber.

• 7:15Scott Galloway?

  But that is fucking ridiculous, even for someone who is blessed with some economic security like myself. But the point is the following. Slowly but surely, streaming media platforms, AI platforms, try to get huge market penetration by underpricing their product, and then they begin raising the price. The prices on streaming media platforms are up 40% to 60% post-COVID. Why? They have consolidated down to a small number of powerful players, specifically Netflix, and now they are raising their prices like crazy. And I would argue that if you took the time to go to unsubscribe February or resist and unsubscribe and looked at all of the companies, and I've bifurcated them into two groups. Ground zero, these are the companies that I think are so overvalued

• 7:58Scott Galloway?

  and so susceptible to some sort of checkback that we have a lot of power, that if we just slow their subscription growth, the president is going to get a very strong signal from these individuals and from the markets. That's ground zero. Then there's the blast zone, companies like AT&T, or Home Depot, or Palantir, or the, basically the companies that are enterprise rent-a-car, or Hilton that is leasing the cars or renting the cars and providing housing for ICE. These are the companies directly enabling and providing infrastructure for ICE. I believe that any significant, or even insignificant dent in their subscriber growth or their business will do the following. Our $27 trillion economy is 70% consumer spending.

• 8:41Scott Galloway?

  And everything we do, or everything the corporate market does, millions of people, billions of dollars, trillions of data points, is to get you to increase your spending by 1, 2, 4% a year. And it is almost impossible to resist. They hit you with the right offer at the right moment. So nonparticipation or canceling, canceling your subscriptions, one, you're going to find you're spending a lot more money than you thought. I found out on the way to unsubscribing that I have three HBO Max accounts. Well, okay, I'm going to go to zero, but at a maximum or at a minimum, I only need one. I don't need three. You're going to find you're spending a lot more money on subscriptions than you thought. I found out I have three different subscriptions to ChatGPT. I've subscribed

• 9:24Scott Galloway?

  to different models and wouldn't you know, they forgot to inform me and they keep charging me. Do you need two LLMs? No, you probably need just one. Do you need five streaming media platforms? No, you probably just need one. But action does absorb anxiety. I'm enjoying this. I feel good about trying to do something. I'm sick of heckling from the cheap seats. And if you too believe that ICE should not be a masked Secret Service police terrorizing Americans, then it's pretty simple. You don't like and subscribe to this podcast, you resist and you unsubscribe. www.resistandunsubscribe and then please share on social the streaming media platforms, the tech platforms, the LLMs you have unsubscribed from. Action absorbs anxiety. Doing things with

• 10:09Scott Galloway?

  other people feels really good. The most radical act you can perform in a capitalist society is nothing, specifically nonparticipation. Okay, today's episode, we speak with Derek Thompson, one of the sharpest voices in media and politics. He's the co-author of Abundance, the host of the Plain English Podcast and writes a Substack about culture, tech and the economy. I really like Derek. I think of myself as someone who discovered Derek, although I think The Atlantic discovered him before me, but I have this fondness, this sort of paternal or fraternal fondness for Derek and I like promoting his work. I think he's really interesting and he seems like a nice man to me. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Derek Thompson.

• 11:08Scott Galloway?

  Derek, where does this podcast find you?

• 11:10Derek Thompson?

  I am in Washington DC.

• 11:11Scott Galloway?

  So I don't know, you'll, I'm sure, if you're like me, I'm a narcissist and I listen to all the podcasts I'm on, of course. And you'll hear my intro to you is, I take responsibility for your success. Even though you're not a young man anymore, I like to think that I'm the one that discovered you, even though The Atlantic and a bunch of other people discovered you first. But something you mentioned before you came on was that you're, this is your first interview back from two months of paternity leave. Talk a little bit about that.

• 11:39Derek Thompson?

  Yeah, so my second daughter was born on December 3rd, 123, and I have been off for exactly two months. Today is her, her two-month doctor checkup. And so this is not just my first day back as a content maker. This is my first hour back, Scott. So I do want to make sure that I pre-apologize to you and all listeners for all of the inarticulateness that people are about to hear. There are a lot of cobwebs still in my head. I'm very proficient right now at filling bottles to exactly their appropriate level to top off a screaming baby, but I am not yet particularly practiced in the year of 2026 at delivering takes. So this is going to be a little bit of like a, like a first pancake and I really appreciate you allowing me to, to put it on the grid over here.

• 12:22Scott Galloway?

  Does your wife work?

• 12:24Derek Thompson?

  She does, yeah. She's still on leave right now. She's extending her leave through March, but she's a clinical psychologist who works with, with pregnant women and new families at a children's hospital in Washington DC.

• 12:37Scott Galloway?

  Oh, wow. So a real job. I'm curious, after taking two months, how you feel about paternity leave?

• 12:44Derek Thompson?

  You know, being a new dad is very interesting. This is my second go at it because in a way, and I wonder if you agree with this.

• 12:55Derek Thompson?

  Early fatherhood, in the first few weeks, is a very strange thing in that you are not biologically necessary to the survival of the child, right? You can't produce the thing that he or she needs in order to live. And so your necessity exists to help the kid, to certainly help your wife. I suppose that parents who, when the child can't breastfeed, our second child is being breastfed, when the child can't breastfeed, I suppose if you're making formula, the father essentially can make formula just as well as the mother. But it's interesting because you are simultaneously so involved, enmeshed in this young human's existence that you love.

• 13:37Derek Thompson?

  And also, your necessity is like a little bit secondary because you exist really, like your job is to be the perfect life-sustaining deputy to your wife. And I think that, you know, learning how to play that role is a really interesting experience. And the other thing about, I think, being a parent of a really young baby is I think most relationships in life, especially relationships wherein we use the word "love," are really two-way streets. You know, we fall in love with a partner because of what they give us in terms of their humor and their kindness, their beauty. You know, we love our parents because of how they treat us and how they dote on us. We love our friends because of maybe our shared commonalities.

• 14:22Derek Thompson?

  But babies, like really young babies, I think if we're being very honest about it, they give you very, very little. I mean, they are very much alive, but in a way, they are barely alive. I mean, they cannot see you practically. They live in like a fuzzy haze of senses. And so it's a relationship of love, and I absolutely adore my baby, that feels very much an act of pure giving, of like of losing yourself to this new entity in your life with the understanding that they will begin to give you smiles and language and receptivity in a few months or a few years. But it's a very unique moment, I think, of feeling deep love where love is like a, is

• 15:06Derek Thompson?

  almost, is like a more pure one-way street, if that makes sense. Does that, does that connect with you as the, as the father of several?

• 15:14Scott Galloway?

  Well, I have two boys, and I would agree with you that, and I remind my boys of this, that the love here is mostly one way. I had this conversation with my 15-year-old last night. I said to him, "Tomorrow, I want you, I want to have a conversation with you, and I want you to answer what question?" He said, "What's that then?" And I said, "What value do you add to this family?

• 15:34Scott Galloway?

  We spent a lot of time and money on you. We spent a lot of effort on you. Your parents basically fashioned fantasy camp for you. You go to this amazing school where all these really talented people spend a lot of time, energy, and expertise to try and make you smarter." I'm like, "What value are you adding to this family or back to your school? I want you to think about it and come back." And he came back with a really thoughtful answer. He said, "I love everybody. I try to be nice, and I'm gonna try and do really well in school." And I'm like, "That's enough for me. If you do those two things, we'll continue the fantasy camp." But going back to newborns, I think dads are mostly a waste of time or space for the first, I'll go much further than two months. I think it's basically the baby is a science

• 16:15Scott Galloway?

  experiment, and we're there to be supportive of our partner, who is, you know, obviously instrumental. I find it's become, and this gets to paternity leave, I think there should be mandatory maternity leave because I think the species needs to propagate. I'm not sure there should be mandatory paternity leave. I think it sometimes creates resentment. I think sometimes it's abused. And so I'm a bit of a capitalist here. I think it's between the company, but I don't know if I immediately default to, oh, the father needs to be there. I'm a bit, I think, more of a 50s dad. Or, you know, I want to see, I don't even believe men should be in the delivery room. I thought that was so disgusting and unnatural. I wanted

• 17:00Scott Galloway?

  them to bring me a baby with a bone in its head while I smoked a cigarette. But I'm probably, I'm probably a little boomer here.

• 17:06Derek Thompson?

  Let me try to make a defense, let me try to make a defense, maybe even a capitalist defense, of paternity leave. Most of the gap between adult, prime-age adult, male and female earnings is a motherhood penalty.

• 17:21Derek Thompson?

  And so one benefit, one benefit of paternity leave is that it puts men and women on relatively more equal standing.

• 17:29Scott Galloway?

  By lowering the economic standards of the man?

• 17:31Derek Thompson?

  By normalizing the idea that both parents take off for a certain period such that the men aren't racing ahead while the women are left at home.

• 17:40Scott Galloway?

  Well, could you?

• 17:41Derek Thompson?

  I just want to press pause there. In a funny way.

• 17:43Scott Galloway?

  Could you flip it, though, and just give money, families and women money when they have kids as opposed to, as opposed to hitting economic livelihood and lowering both down?

• 17:53Derek Thompson?

  That's interesting. I feel like I want to like drag on The Economist, who wrote the last paper that I read on the motherhood penalty here. But my recollection is that what happens is, as you know, within companies, and especially with greedy jobs where income rises exponentially to time put into the job, like, say, law firms, or maybe even work that we do, in those higher paying industries, the leaps into the C suites tend to happen in one's early to mid 30s, which for college educated Americans today are precisely the childbearing years for young families. And so if you create a scenario where women are taking off three to six months while

• 18:35Derek Thompson?

  men take off two weeks, then my expectation is that you would see the income gap between men and women start to increase again, because I think it's been declining over the last few decades. But the challenge here is, and this goes back to the way that you, you know, amusingly put it, you know, biology has created significant inequalities between men and women when it comes to how our bodies can keep our children alive. But the decisions that we make for society can, I think, make outcomes more equal than biology has inscribed. And I think that we should hope that outcomes are more equal than biology has inscribed here, at least when it comes to final income in one's 40s and 50s. But it's, but it's a tough issue. And I would say that, you know,

• 19:19Derek Thompson?

  We are, as species, inscribed with an instinct to procreate. But we have to also be inscribed with an instinct to parent as well. Because if there's no knowledge of, if there's no embedded knowledge of how to parent a helpless, helpless baby, then babies don't survive. And we have that, men have that. And one thing that I've learned and really been surprised to feel as a dad is that typically, I consider myself a kind of wire cutter person. It's like, what suitcase should I buy? I go to Wirecutter to figure out what the New York Times thinks is the best suitcase. What pants should I buy? I go to whatever, J. Crew. But as a dad, I feel like an enormous upsurge of instinct for how to parent my child.

• 20:02Derek Thompson?

  Even down to ideas of like, I love pretending to be a monster around my two-year-old. No one taught me to be a monster. It comes up in me as if it's the echo of some ancestral instinct from 10,000 years ago. And I love that. I love discovering a new piece of myself in parenting. And so, as secondary, I think, as some fathers may feel to the early parenting process, I do think it's really important for us to lean in, both to help our partners and to discover that part of ourselves that I think really is there to be discovered, that is inscribed by evolution and by little genes that are waiting to be acted on by our interactions with our little babies.

• 20:47Scott Galloway?

  Let me end with congratulations. I think it's wonderful when people such as yourself, I don't know your wife, decide to have kids. I do think that, I mean, it's good for the world, I think it's good for you. How old is your first daughter now?

• 21:00Derek Thompson?

  She's two.

• 21:01Scott Galloway?

  She's two? Oh, okay. So you're in Vietnam right now. The next few years, you're gonna come on podcasts like this and talk about your natural instinct to fathering. It sucks. Just, I mean, the good, the bad news is it just sucks for the dad. We pretend to like it. I think dads are full of shit when they say they like babies. They're awful. Your job is just to make sure mom doesn't lose her shit and get some sleep and keep the baby away from bodies of water. That is literally your only two jobs right now, or the only two things that you're any good at. At about two or three, it starts to get less awful. And then by four or five, it almost becomes fun and it gets it gets better and better. Anyways, there's my parenting advice. Gets less

• 21:42Derek Thompson?

  Something to look forward to.

• 21:43Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 21:44Derek Thompson?

  Thank you.

• 21:44Scott Galloway?

  So let's bust into the stuff you actually write about. You ended 2025 with this great essay about trends and themes. You're watching as we head into 2026. You covered AI, GLP-1s, young people in crisis, our casino economy. I first up, I love all of these things. I feel like I'm either parroting you or you're parroting me or we were we're brothers from another mother. And also the relentless negativity bias we live in. Have any of those, as you've had some time off to think about this stuff? What what do you think is bearing out? What do you think is is turning up? What cards are turning up correct that you predicted? Or have they changed or not?

• 22:28Scott Galloway?

  Or manifested in different ways? Give us an update on those things and how you're thinking about them.

• 22:33Derek Thompson?

  Yeah, when I think about just, you know, what are the most important trends that are affecting our life in the day to day, year to year basis? The two most important, I think, in a way, are the two most obvious. I think Donald Trump and AI are the two most important forces for shaping American life.

• 22:54Derek Thompson?

  What's happening with AI? What has happened just in the last few weeks with the debut of Claude Code? I think it's just extraordinary. I mean, there are incredibly well compensated and talented developers in San Francisco and around the world that now are not writing code. They are not doing their job as they did it for the previous years and decades of their career. They are instructing in plain language, artificial intelligence to write code for them. And I think the possibility that something like Claude Code does for knowledge work, what it's already done for computer programming is absolutely a live possibility that we have to consider. I don't yet know how it's going to change marketing jobs and PR jobs.

• 23:38Derek Thompson?

  But maybe one metaphor that can help people understand the impact that I think AI will have on work, even if they aren't involved in or have never even heard of Claude Code, is to think about something like Excel. So in the 1960s, 1970s, a tiny share of Americans worked in spreadsheets. Like spreadsheet work was a miniscule share of overall white collar work. And with the invention of Excel and other digital spreadsheet tools, someone might have predicted that all these spreadsheet jobs would just go away. Because like the 5,000 people that were working in spreadsheets would essentially be automated entirely. And you would need only five people to do the job of 5,000, right?

• 24:19Derek Thompson?

  That's one prediction, to essentially treat Excel as kind of like what the car did to the horse. Just absolutely obliterate the entire labor sector. But instead, what happened is that Excel didn't replace all the spreadsheet jobs. Excel turned almost every single white collar job into a spreadsheet job, such that today, everybody graduates from college, they leave Middlebury, they leave Trinity, they leave the University of Michigan. And what do they do on their, you know, their first day of work? They learn how to use Excel. I think that is a useful analog for how Claude Code and similar tools are going to affect the white collar labor force. I think everybody is going to be working with these tools in the near future. And your ability to be proficient with them is going to really, really affect your ability

• 25:04Derek Thompson?

  to not only get that first job, but also advance in your career. So one thing I'm really looking at a lot is artificial intelligence. And we can, we can hold on that a bit because there's, there's so much more to say about what's going on in that space. But one more theme that I think is really important to, to remember and to hold on to is that if you read the news cycle, if you read the newspapers every single day, and you mentioned negativity bias, you are going to be struck, punched in the face with a steady, just whack after whack of terrible thing happening in America and around the world. And our political system is terrible. And so many things that are happening in anything that makes contact with politics right now, I think truly is terrible. But at the same time that we're living in a dark age of politics,

• 25:49Derek Thompson?

  I think it's really important to remember that we're living in a golden age of living, which is to say longevity. The homicide rate declined last year by its largest amount on record. Traffic deaths are declining and self-driving cars are going to hasten their decline. Suicide's declining. Drug overdoses are plunging, although from a very high, high, opiate's right, fentanyl. You add to that GLP-1s, which reduce not just obesity, but also cardiovascular disease and maybe even neurodegenerative disease. This is, Scott, this is the first period on record when murders, violent crimes, traffic deaths, drug overdoses, suicides, and obesity are all declining at the exact same time. It's the first period in our lives that all these things are happening at the same time. And if the purpose of life is to live, if the purpose of life is to live, to survive

• 26:34Derek Thompson?

  through it, then we are living in a kind of golden age. We're living in a golden age of living. And so I think that as many terrible things are happening, and I'm not trying to take away from those terrible things by glossing over them. I'm saying that's column A. And there's also a column B that we are in a golden age of life. And I pay a lot of attention to my work, to what's happening in the space of science and technology and the things that kill us and how we're trying to fix them.

• 27:00Scott Galloway?

  Well, I think that's really powerful. Even if you look abroad, in the last 40 years, the life expectancy in China's gone from 47 to 77. Well, I'll put it forward to thesis. So, okay, why are we so unhappy? I would say it's two things. One, the algorithms want us fighting with each other. I haven't spent a lot of time on TikTok recently. I went back on and I noticed I'm being so manipulated into hating everyone and everything. And then, oh, there's a cat video and it's some Neosporin, so I don't lose my shit and log off forever. And then it goes back to talking about misogyny and Trump and why this bestseller person is actually an awful person and it's thinly veiled. It just, everything is, let me take the worst angle of everything because I sound smarter

• 27:45Scott Galloway?

  and it's a hot take and the algorithm loves the rage baiting and elevates that content. And two, the way our brains work is we don't think, oh, having a hot shower and Novocain and Netflix makes us the wealthiest person in the world just 100 years ago. It's Derek is at the Aspen Ideas Festival and has a really cool family and a nice life and gets to do what he wants and is wealthy. And if I'm not Derek Thompson, by the time I'm 30, I'm failing. That we don't compare ourselves to people 100 years ago or look at the stats. We compare ourselves to the Instagram version of everyone's life. Those are my, what I see as the drivers of our unhappiness. But I'd be curious, A, do you agree with that? And am I missing things?

• 28:31Derek Thompson?

  I wrote an essay a few weeks ago, a few months ago, I guess, at this point, called "Everything is Television", about how all of media is assuming the vocabulary of television. The podcast's becoming television and social media's becoming television. And the AI companies, OpenAI, are trying to turn AI into, with things like Sora 2, television. And as our lives become more intermediated by screens and as we spend more of our lives looking at the beautiful lives of others, I absolutely believe that as comparison is the thief of joy, if we build machines of comparison, we are going to be stealing from ourselves the joy that we should feel. I think that's part of it. I also think that something you see on social media,

• 29:13Derek Thompson?

  in journalism, in podcasts, in online essays, on Reddit, is many people making a kind of simultaneous discovery that negativity juices viewership and sharing metrics more than almost any other emotional valence. And so we're simultaneously, all of us, essentially like, we're all like, marketing scientists trying to figure out, how do I make my message go viral? How do I make my show go viral? How do I make my clip go viral? And we're all learning around the same time that as the NYU professor Jay Van Bavel has shown, Jonathan Haidt has talked about this a lot, negative emotions go viral.

• 29:57Derek Thompson?

  Negative words in headlines increase headline sharing. In-group versus out-group frames for ideas tend to increase sharing within certain groups. So if it is the case that we're all essentially participating in these ecosystems where we're learning that the best way to lift ourselves up is to be negative, especially about some other out-group, then of course we're going to find that when we pick up our phones, we're going to live in this kind of stew of negativity. And that's going to make us feel not only like the only things happening in the world are bad things, but also that the only right posture that we should have toward the world is one in which we seek out enemies to hate and to demonize. So I think that as more of our lives becomes a kind of...

• 30:40Derek Thompson?

  Nonstop pageantry of short-form video in which negativity makes ideas go more viral. Of course, we feel more negative about our lives and about the world. And that's on top of the fact that, and I always want to make sure that I say this as well, there's a lot of bad things happening. Like, I do think Trump is absolutely a wannabe fascist. I do think that lots of things that are happening with AI could seriously threaten jobs or are already threatening the law. There are many, many bad things that are happening, but our ability to find the bad things has improved at the same time that our ability to find the good things, I think, has deteriorated.

• 31:13Scott Galloway?

  I also worry, I'm curious if you've done an analysis here, that many of our adversaries, whether it's the GRU or the CCP, see that as our soft tissue. That, okay, we can't beat them economically or kinetically, let's just get them hating each other. And these vehicles are just, are just perfect.

• 31:32Derek Thompson?

  Yeah, I don't think Americans need much help in hating each other from the CCP. I think we're very good at doing that.

• 31:37Scott Galloway?

  They were doing it on our own.

• 31:38Derek Thompson?

  But it's always, I suppose it's possible that they could lend a helping hand to that, to that effort. I was just reminded that in October of last year, I published two articles in my Substack. One article was called "Why AI is a Bubble." The other article was called "Why AI is Not a Bubble." Both of these were interviews with other experts, so it was mostly me providing a platform for someone else's expertise. There's no mystery in your mind, or the mind of anyone listening to or watching this show, which article got like 7X more traffic? Why AI is a Bubble or Why AI is Not a Bubble? Of course, Why AI is a Bubble is the one that got 7X the traffic.

• 32:21Derek Thompson?

  I thought they were equally good, but the, it is natural that our attention be drawn to that which offers a sense of threat in our environment. And so, media makers' ability to catastrophize subjects essentially like tickles that ancient instinct to pay attention to threats in your environment, right? Why this person is dangerous? Tickles that threat instinct. I think, you know, my, I've written about this many, many times because I think there's been a lot of studies about negativity bias and because I think lots of people who comment on news biases and say news is biased toward corporations, right? It's corporate media is biased toward protecting the powerful, or media is biased toward

• 33:05Derek Thompson?

  the right, or media is biased toward the left. When we talk about media bias, in order to be smarter media consumers, we often ascribe that bias to ideology or corporate versus populism. But the most profound bias in all of news is a bias toward negativity. And so, one thing I encourage when I give talks about media literacy or when I write about it is to say, it's not to say that there aren't people that are biased toward the right or left. Of course, there's many people that are biased toward the right or left, but fundamentally, the most profound bias in all of news media is a bias toward making you think that something that happened or someone who exists is or could cause a catastrophe. That negativity bias really is the beating heart of modern virality.

• 33:48Derek Thompson?

  And once you sort of have a nose for that, my hope is that you start to sort of look for vegetables in your media diet when you know that you're eating a lot of highly-processed food. With the negativity stuff is the highly-processed food. And articles that seek out solutions or point to ways in which the world might be able to be fixed or get better, right? Those are the vegetables that people are sometimes, I think, a little bit less eager to consume.

• 34:14Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 34:23Scott Galloway?

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• 35:08Scott Galloway?

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• 35:22Scott Galloway?

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• 36:07Scott Galloway?

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• 36:29Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up. When audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The regentech trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400 plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 37:14Scott Galloway?

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• 37:38Scott Galloway?

  Talk about, you and I both share a passion for the potential change. Because I believe the most important technology is not AI. I think it's GLP-1. And if you ask someone who's on GLP-1 drugs, what's had a bigger impact on your life? GLP-1 or AI? I know what they're going to answer. Talk a little bit about your view on GLP-1 technology.

• 38:06Derek Thompson?

  I like calling it a technology. I think because its implications are just that profound. So to back up just a little bit, I think most people are familiar with the story. But we're talking about a drug, GLP-1s, like peptide one drugs, receptor agonists, that were discovered initially in the most absurd of scientific experiments, right? Scraping saliva out of the mouth of a Gila monster, which I think should inspire us to not shut down scientific projects that might seem a little bit kooky from the onset, right? Like, don't shut down the crazy sounding science projects. They can absolutely change and even save the world. This is a drug that, of course, many people know was initially developed to fight type 2 diabetes.

• 38:50Derek Thompson?

  It was revealed in many patient populations that people were losing significant amounts of weight. It was then studied specifically for its weight loss possibilities, and that really opened the door to the current revolution that most people know about, the GLP-1 revolution. But I think what people don't appreciate enough is how many benefits seem to come from GLP-1s in ways that, at least initially, seem to have nothing to do with weight loss. These drugs, for a variety of reasons that I can get into, but I've done a lot of podcasts on this with experts, but I think I myself only understand it a little bit, are extraordinary anti-inflammation drugs. We have GLP-1 receptors throughout our bodies, even in our brains, so that when we take

• 39:35Derek Thompson?

  these drugs, they aren't just acting on our gut, they're acting on our, on entire biological systems in us. So they seem to be good for protecting against neurodegenerative disease. That's being researched right now, and we'll see exactly how good they are at, for example, slowing down symptoms of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But it's being tested for that at the moment. They seem to be very, very good at slowing cardiovascular disease. And this is so interesting. I think this is one of the most interesting things about it. The benefits of GLP-1s for cardiovascular disease seem to take place even before the patient has lost weight, which suggests that the pathway by which GLP-1s are helping us live longer, helping our bodies be healthy, might be a totally separate pathway than

• 40:20Derek Thompson?

  the one by which it helps us lose weight. That's so interesting to me. The way that I think about these drugs is that it's almost like, I never played pinball as a kid that often, but you know, like with a pinball, you, you, you launch the ball, and then it pings around a bunch of these different systems on the board, right? It pings over here, and dingaling over here, and then wah wah wah over here in the left-hand corner. That's what these GLP-1 drugs seem to do. They don't just touch our gut. They touch our brains, they touch our cardiovascular system, they touch other endocrine systems. They seem to be a kind of magical whisperer of moderation for entire biological systems in ways that help us lose weight, reduce arthritis, maybe reduce neurodegenerative

• 41:04Derek Thompson?

  disease, reduce cardiovascular disease, and even do some weird things like... Reduce cravings for certain things that we know we don't want, like for example, no, we shouldn't want. Like, for example, they seem to reduce gambling addiction and even cigarette addiction. And so the way I would, I would encourage people to think about these drugs is that there's things they do that aren't mysterious, right? They clearly help people with type 2 diabetes. They clearly help people lose double-digit percentage points amounts of weight. But there's this whole landscape of possible ways that they are improving our health. And what's exciting, and I'll end my answer

• 41:43Derek Thompson?

  here, what's exciting is that companies like Eli Lilly can tweak these medicines to maybe have more of one effect than the other. So maybe develop an addition of GLP-1 drugs that work a little bit less on weight loss, but work a little bit more on protecting against cardiovascular disease. So the people who are already thin but might have a genetic predisposition to early heart attacks, their dad, their grandfather, their great-grandfather, all, you know, drop dead at 55 of a heart attack. Now, this is a drug that is essentially like a super empowered statin. I think the, the possibilities here are really, really interesting, but I would encourage people who are interested in this space to not think

• 42:27Derek Thompson?

  of this drug as a panacea. Panaceas don't exist, but rather think of it as something that could, in the very near future, be seen as the solution to a lot of different medical problems.

• 42:36Scott Galloway?

  I find these things just so profoundly game-changing. And when I think of every other technology or medical tech, you know, chemotherapy, if you do enough of it, you're going to get cancer 20 or 30 years down the road. There's, it feels like there's almost no free lunch here. And every additional piece of information coming out on these seems to be, oh, here's another positive thing. A technology that tells your brain to eat less ice cream, but eat more kale. I mean, how does that, how does that even happening? And they're like, it's either way, I describe it as scaffolding on our instincts. It basically says, all right, your instincts haven't caught up to the industrial production. We're going to catch your instincts up to industrial production, such that you realize you don't need to gorge, you don't need to watch a ton of porn, you don't need to be

• 43:20Scott Galloway?

  on social media all day, you don't need to bite your nails. Supposedly 40% of people on GLP-1s are biting their nails less. You wrote a book with Ezra Klein called Abundance, and I'm thinking a lot about deficit reduction. And every time I do a hard analysis around how we would be able to politically and economically reduce the deficit, it all leads back to one place, and that is reducing healthcare costs. And for me, reducing healthcare costs all comes back to one place. And I want to pitch this idea to you and get your response. We put out, the federal government puts out the world's biggest RFP for GLP-1 drugs and says, we need, I don't know, we need a billion doses. Lowest cost wins. My guess is they could get someone to bid pretty low for a billion doses.

• 44:03Scott Galloway?

  And then they offer it for free to every household in America. I think that would be the quickest way to reduce healthcare costs and our deficit. Your thoughts?

• 44:12Derek Thompson?

  I have friends in the healthcare space and in the health tech space who are healthy, who are microdosing on GLP-1 drugs. They consider their work a kind of experiment, and I've heard positive feedback from that experiment. That said, as you said, there's no free lunch in health, right? It's not like chemotherapy being a great example of it can slow the development of some cancers, but in no way are patients on chemotherapy thinking of that medicine as being a free lunch for themselves. GLP-1s aren't entirely a free lunch either. They do have side effects. They can cause stomach distress.

• 44:56Derek Thompson?

  Some people don't like the changes that they feel to maybe their dopamine or their sort of their hormone composition. They, their muscle loss certainly, right? Sarkopenia for older Americans is a huge problem. There's no 85-year-old in America who says, God, I wish I had fewer muscles. So we, for older Americans in particular, and if we're interested right now in solving for healthcare spending, want to be, I think, really quite focused on how do we reduce spending, especially on the final years of life? And one question that occurred to me that I don't even know that I have the answer to, as you were describing the scenario, right? I had two thoughts as you were describing it.

• 45:35Derek Thompson?

  Number one, I don't know about how beneficial full doses of GLP-1s would be for otherwise healthy Americans. I just don't know because of the side effect profile. And number two,

• 45:48Derek Thompson?

  Given that a significant amount of Medicare and Medicaid spending happens toward the end of life, how much spending would we be removing by putting people on GLP-1s in a way that might overall extend lifespans by another year and a half? Like, eventually, people on GLP-1s, who are healthy until they're 80, will still potentially get Alzheimer's, cancer. And treating Alzheimer's and cancer, whether it's through medicine or through nursing homes, is incredibly expensive. A significant amount of our health spending goes essentially toward taking someone who's about to die in three months

• 46:32Derek Thompson?

  and allowing them to live another six. I mean, this is, this might sound, you know, a little bit, the way that I'm describing it might sound a little careless or bloodless to some people. But both of my parents died in their 60s of cancer. And so I understand as much as anybody just how valuable to family members those extra six months can be, right? Those tens of thousands of dollars certainly felt worth it to me. But as you said, extended across the entire country, it adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars at a time when our deficit is increasing quite significantly. So the truth is, I don't know how to make end-of-life care

• 47:14Derek Thompson?

  more economically efficient with drugs alone. I just don't know. So I do think that more use of GLP-1 drugs would improve people's health spans. But I don't know how to solve that ultimate boss problem of making end-of-life care more efficient. And I do think that if we're really serious about reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending for the purpose of the deficit, we have to answer that final question of, what do we do about end-of-life care?

• 47:43Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's a really good point. I would almost bifurcate them. And that is, one is, 70% of Americans are obese and overweight. And unfortunately, there's an economic incentive, whether it's knee replacement firms or hospital complexes or diabetes statins. There's just a lot of money. Or plus-size clothing. This bullshit notion, and I've gotten pushback on this, that Plus size clothing firms want to convince you that you're finding your truth when you're obese. No, you're not. You're finding diabetes. I'm not suggesting we don't have empathy for people and try and solve food deserts and give people the money they need so they can eat more healthfully. But celebrating obesity is not the way to go. I think that's a different, I think trying to reduce the level

• 48:22Scott Galloway?

  of obesity, which I believe is a big contributor to the fact we spend twice as much per capita on healthcare than any other nation. That's one issue. What you're talking about is, is it good for people and families, but bad for the economy? When as people, the unproductive part of their lives economically just get bigger and bigger and bigger relative to the productive part of their lives? And does that mean we either have to extend the working age or do social? I mean, all roads are leading to the same place. We've got to make the last 20, 30, 40 years of your life less expensive for everybody else. Right? We've got to figure out a way to either start social security at 75 or have retirement accounts for your, or I didn't know your parents had passed in their

• 49:06Scott Galloway?

  60s. My father just passed and the last, my mom, like, like your parents passed in their 60s from cancer. I, anyways, we'll come back to that because 60s is so young. But the last year of his life, California actually has this really innovative program where nurses, registered nurses are given low interest loans to buy homes if they turn their homes into hospice. Because the hospital is incredibly, not only incredibly expensive, but incredibly dangerous. And my dad lived in a room in this house with a husband and wife Filipino couple who were nurses and spent his last year there. And Medicaid covered part of it. I came up with the rest.

• 49:46Scott Galloway?

  It was still expensive, but it was costing me, I think at one point, before my dad went into this facility, I had him in a facility where they had to have round the clock care for him at one point. I'm not exaggerating, Derek, and I, I had a woman show up and hang out with him every day so he wouldn't be lonely. And granted, I have the resources to do that and I kind of overfilled it. I was spending a quarter of a million dollars a year on my father's end of life. And I realize most people cannot do that, but this one program took it down substantially. But I would almost bifurcate. There's the obesity problem, which would have a huge impact. And then there's just a reality that old people continue to vote themselves more money. I want to find, most of the stuff we're talking about, people can find in your books and your articles.

• 50:30Scott Galloway?

  But I want, I think my audience wants to know the real Derek Thompson. I'm curious, to the extent you're comfortable, what is your relationship with substances and GLP-1? Do you microdose anything? Do you drink alcohol? Do you, do you do edibles? Like, what is your approach? I think of you as being such a thoughtful guy. What is your approach and view on substances?

• 50:52Derek Thompson?

  So my dad was a lawyer who was also a wine journalist. He was a columnist for the Washington Post in the 1980s. And he wrote about wine. He was the first journalist to get access to the White House wine cellar in the second half of the 20th century and wrote a piece about Ronald Reagan bringing wine back to the White House. This is someone who, for whom wine was as important as almost anything else in his life. So I grew up drinking wine and only wine. I think before I went to college, I had never had vodka. I'd never had tequila. I don't think I had had more than three sips of beer when I turned 18, but I drank wine almost every day with my parents. So wine's really important to me and I'm a huge and impossible wine snob. But I also, I love cocktails.

• 51:37Derek Thompson?

  I love making cocktails. I love martinis. I love doing weird stuff with Negronis. I really, really like alcohol. I drink moderately. I drink as moderately as I can, given that I really, really like the taste of alcohol.

• 51:48Scott Galloway?

  How many drinks a week? This is what, let me go first. As of last year, I was drinking 16 drinks a week. I've tried to cut it down to four to six. How many drinks a week? You know those fucking surveys when you get a physical? How many drinks a week? And then you realize you're an alcoholic. Well, how many drinks a week does Derek Thompson drink?

• 52:06Derek Thompson?

  I'd say I have one drink.

• 52:11Derek Thompson?

  Three or four nights a week and two drinks, two nights a week. Uh, so I'd say maybe, let's say seven or eight drinks a week. Um, and, uh, I, just given my constitution, I can't at this stage at thirty nine, almost forty, drink more than two drinks a night without, um, taking one of these, um, one of the, one of these pills that I found on, on Instagram ads.

• 52:33Scott Galloway?

  Zbiotics, the probiotics?

• 52:33Derek Thompson?

  It's basically, it's basically Zbiotics.

• 52:35Scott Galloway?

  I do that.

• 52:36Derek Thompson?

  It's the postbiotics. It's the thing that you take after you have more than two drinks. And honestly, whether it's, um, pure placebo effect, uh, or not, it really works. So, so I use that. I, yeah. So whenever I have more than two drinks a night, or even if I have two drinks, especially late, um, I'll, I'll take that. One other thing that I'll share is that I have an Oura ring, um, and one thing that I learned, the first big thing I learned about my Oura ring is if I have my martini between five and six thirty, I sleep like a baby. And if I have my martini between seven thirty and ten thirty.

• 53:05Scott Galloway?

  Your, your martini between five and six, are you Paul Lynn coming home from a hard day and your wife prepares a martini for you? I love that.

• 53:12Derek Thompson?

  My wife is not preparing my martini. I, the, the things I do with martinis right now are, um, are, are somewhat torturous, maybe to the definition of martini. My favorite martini is a, um, is a Vesper, a drink, uh, that Sir Ian Fleming invented in the Book of Sino-Rial. A Vesper is, um, a dry martini where you split the spirit between gin and vodka. So I split the spirit between gin and vodka. I probably two parts gin, one part vodka. You mix it with some LeBlanc. And then what I do that drives some people crazy, but whenever they have my, um, Vesper, they understand my truth. Not only do I slightly rinse the chilled glass with a little bit of absinthe,

• 53:54Derek Thompson?

  but I also pour a dollop of tiny little bit of olive oil and a crack of sugar. A crack of sugar, she said it'd be ridiculous. Salt on top. So it is a salted, olive-oiled, absinthe-rinced Vesper. And I make myself, uh, that drink, um, pretty much every, every weekday during, uh, over parent leave. And it certainly made the hours of six thirty to eight thirty fly by much more enjoyably. But that's my, that's my favorite martini. I use edibles when I watch movies. I love the way that, um, I'm more like, like my, my brain turns into a perfectly passive screen for especially beautiful, beautiful films, you know, Denis Villeneuve film or Paul Thomas Anderson film.

• 54:39Derek Thompson?

  So I love edibles for big, beautiful movies. I smoke only occasionally these days. And in terms of harder drugs and psychedelics, it's just never been a part of my life. It's not that I'm so much against them. It's just that really, for, for some of these things, it's almost a roll of the dice for, you know, who do you live with as a kid or who's your roommate in college or, you know, who's your roommate after college?

• 55:05Scott Galloway?

  What's your partner?

• 55:06Derek Thompson?

  Or certainly your partner, right. Yeah, I, I just, I never really, it's, it's not so much that I'm like so against the use of cocaine and some big picture. I've never really known people that do it. And I've never really been close friends with people that do psychedelic drugs. So have never tried those. And I'm just a martini loving, edible, popping Denis Villeneuve fan, I guess.

• 55:26Scott Galloway?

  My respect and admiration for you could not get any higher and it has. I'd love you to respond to the following. I've got a lot of pushback on this, but when I think about the loneliness crisis, what, you know, everything's a crisis. The loneliness issue, if you will, people, the sex recession. I think young people need to drink more. And I'm not suggesting they ignore addiction in their family or whether or not it's getting in the way of the rest of their lives. But going out with friends, having a couple of drinks, enjoying an edible with your partner, watching a movie. Occasionally, when you're single, finding an environment with other single people and maybe having a drink to

• 56:06Scott Galloway?

  loosen up and develop, you know, what they call liquid courage, that if 24% of teens are addicted to social media and only 6% are addicted to pills or alcohol, it says to me that the risks to the 25-year-old liver are dwarfed by the risks of social isolation when you're not drinking. And some, I think young people should drink more. Your thoughts?

• 56:26Derek Thompson?

  I think young people should probably drink a little bit more.

• 56:34Derek Thompson?

  I think their lives would be made better. Moreish. Yeah, more. I don't want to be like, just like the cliche of a Eight tequila shots, that's not the answer. No, it's like, do I think, if the question were posed this way, do I think that the typical 20-something life would be improved with two more single cocktail hangouts with a friend? Yes, absolutely. I think the benefits of that increased sociability far outweigh the demerits of those two cocktails. I think that we're learning a lot, by the way, right now. We certainly know, we have erased, I think, the fiction that alcohol might be good for you, right? There were those reports, like the 60 Minutes thing about like

• 57:18Derek Thompson?

  the French paradox, about how, let's be honest, yeah, the glass of wine is like ice cream. Like, no one tells themselves that the ice cream is a medicine for their longevity. They eat ice cream because ice cream is damn delicious. I drink red wine because I think red wine is damn delicious, not because I think that it's secretly good for my health. We should have that relationship with booze, absolutely. But I think we're learning a lot right now about the degree to which sociability and social connection is salubrious, is protective of our health. I just talked to someone on my podcast last year about how one of the highest indicators of great memory in old age is the degree to which you are keeping up a large network of friends. And that makes sense almost evolutionarily, because you can imagine, like, what is memory for?

• 58:03Derek Thompson?

  Like, why do you know how the average longevity of Chinese people increased from 47 to 77 in the X few decades? Why does your brain have that capacity? Well, it makes sense, because memory serves as our ability to organize the social relationships in our lives, right? That tribe over there is good, that tribe over there is bad, this guy can help me hunt, that woman can help me, you know, hunt and gather. Memory is for social connection, and maybe by converse, social connection helps our memory. So I'm a huge advocate of people hanging out more and people getting out of their houses more. I know that can be difficult sometimes. Couches are comfortable, TVs are

• 58:43Derek Thompson?

  Phones are an incredible black hole of our attentions and energies. But people should absolutely hang out more. Should they, you know, risk the possibility of extra hangovers to do it? No, I would say more booze, still minimizing hangovers as you can, using your Zbiotics. But absolutely, sociality, I think, should be thought of as not just something that's fun, but something that's almost like social fitness, right? Like, people go to the gym because they know that it's good to press their muscles. It's good to sweat. It's good to be breathless from time to time, you know, zone two, zone three exercises. In the same way, I think we're just coming around to understanding the degree to which being around other people is a kind of social gym.

• 59:27Derek Thompson?

  We're doing something to our bodies, to our cardiovascular systems, to our minds, that's not only enriching in the moment, but also protecting us for the long run. And if people need some of my, you know, olive oil, crack of salt, absinthe, rinsed vest from a teenager to do it, I'm happy to welcome more people to my Mount Pleasant House in Washington, DC to do it.

• 59:50Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

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• 1:00:57Scott Galloway?

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• 1:02:05Scott Galloway?

  We're back with more from Derek Thompson. Let's switch to AI. You've mentioned that you'll be watching AI as a source of inequality at several levels. What did you mean by that?

• 1:02:17Derek Thompson?

  Well, it started at the highest level, right? I mean, the US economy is not healthy if you take away artificial intelligence. The hiring rate is slowing down, manufacturing is declining, blue collar workforce is in absolute structural decline at the moment, which is certainly ironic, given that the Liberation Day tariffs were designed to help the blue collar economy. Everything that's going gangbusters is going gangbusters in AI, right? The AI companies have had a great few years in the stock market, despite the little wobbles the last few days and weeks. The data center economy is booming. All this construction money has moved from houses and corporate real estate toward data centers. So at the highest level, the AI economy is strong and the non-AI economy is weak.

• 1:02:59Derek Thompson?

  At the next level, at the level of companies, if you look at the stock market, the companies that are closest to artificial intelligence have gained the most in terms of equity value, and the companies that aren't near artificial intelligence have either been stagnating or declining in large part. So at the company level, you have this inequality that AI is creating. And then finally, I think we're going to start to see, not just at software companies, but at white collar economies writ large, a gap opening up between workers who understand how to use AI to make themselves more productive and workers who either don't understand AI or, for whatever reason, are averse to the technology at a kind of constitutional level. So I see AI as being this sort of, this machine for

• 1:03:41Derek Thompson?

  generating inequality at the macroeconomic level, at the stock market level, and at the labor force level. And that's why I said I think we just need to pay attention to the degree to which AI is going to be like, we talk, people talk about like the K-shaped economy. Like, imagine that the top line of the K is AI and this down-sloping line of the K is everything that's not AI. I see that beginning to happen right now. And it's interesting from a journalistic standpoint, but it's also concerning, I think, from a human standpoint.

• 1:04:08Scott Galloway?

  The thing I find fascinating about your own career, I've been, you know, obviously, I've been tracking you pretty closely. You were at The Atlantic, but you've started a really robust Substack offering. And to a certain extent, I think I've referenced you a couple of times, is what the future of media might look like, and that it's not, it's not or, it's and. And that is, people will use these traditional platforms for their brand halo, for their commitment to excellence. They have, they actually, they do have enterprise value. I'm sure the editors that frustrate you sometimes also add a lot of value to your work. You know, the festivals, the infrastructure, the fact-checking. But at the same time, the propulsion, the hunger, the direct-to-consumer, the speed of turnaround of a Substack, and also, quite frankly,

• 1:04:54Scott Galloway?

  Seventy, eighty, ninety percent of the economic value you create goes to you. Whereas at most traditional media, I think maybe between three and 10%, depending on who you are and how powerful you are. You know, Rachel Maddow probably gets 100% of her, you know, because she's in an unusual position. Stephanie Ruhl probably gets 10%. And then most people who appear on MSNBC or CNN get 1% or 2%. So the ability to go direct to consumer and capture most of that economic value, I think, is actually a plus. I'm curious, talk a little bit about, as transparently as you're willing to be, how you have managed your career as a, I won't call you a creator, but as a journalist and

• 1:05:38Scott Galloway?

  someone who puts out a lot of content, there's a, you have a bit of a flywheel. You have books, you have Substack. I imagine, do you do speaking gigs? I imagine you get asked to do speaking gigs. We're sort of in the same business, if you will. And you also, you do, you do a podcast, Plain English. Talk to me about the business of your flywheel and how you're managing your own career and what observations you would have about what you got right and what you got wrong.

• 1:06:01Derek Thompson?

  You nailed the way that I think about my work. I sort of have these, these four pillars. I have my day-to-day or week-to-week writing, which is on Substack and used to be at The Atlantic. I have my podcast, Plain English, with The Ringer, owned by Spotify. I have the books that I write, the last book I wrote, Being Abundance, with Ezra Klein. And then I have my speaking, which I really enjoy doing. I, yeah, it's lucrative and that's lovely. Money's cool. But it's also really fun to be flown to places you wouldn't otherwise be and talk to people in other countries, in other industries, get feedback on your work, see other people who you admire. So that's, that's the sort of the fourth pillar there.

• 1:06:44Derek Thompson?

  And the way that I think about this work now is it's a little bit like, you know, I used to act before I was a writer. And with acting, you have rehearsals, and then you have dress rehearsals, which are just like a performance. And then you have previews, which are sort of unofficial shows for an audience. Then you have opening night, and then you have the running of the show. And in a way, I've started to think of the flywheel I've created as existing in a, in a kind of similar process or similar evolution.

• 1:07:16Derek Thompson?

  The best podcasts I do, I think, are podcasts where I have a burning question and I still want to learn something. So that's a little bit like rehearsals. I have a question about how AI is going to affect the future of the labor force, but I don't have a thesis. So it's great to bring on somebody to be the expert on that platform, and I ask, I hope, or intelligent questions, and they give me some answers. Once I feel like I have a thesis to share with the world, that's a great column. So then I'll turn that into a Substack essay. And if I start to find that my Substack essays share a sort of conceptual box, like they did with Abundance, that I thought that there were problems in America that had to be solved by our relearning the art of building things

• 1:07:58Derek Thompson?

  that Americans need and want, then it's time to turn that project into a book. And I'm doing that right now with my work on the antisocial century, the rise of aloneness, and the degree to which aloneness, I think, is reshaping the economy and politics and the lives of people in 21st century. I just think it's one of the most important social phenomena in the modern world. And then finally, when I publish a book, as you know, people who book speakers are sometimes interested in booking them for an essay that they wrote, maybe interested in booking them for a podcast that they wrote. But books really are the currency of the realm for a reason that I don't entirely know myself. Like, books, just brief aside, books are such an interesting cultural product. Because if your book sells

• 1:08:43Derek Thompson?

  a couple hundred thousand copies, it's a massive bestseller. But articles that get a couple hundred thousand views happen every day, and nobody remembers them a couple of months later. If a movie sells a couple hundred thousand, even 1 million, tickets in a year, average movie ticket price right now is maybe like $10.70, it's only $10 million. It's basically what Melania made in its first weekend. It's not that much money. But for some reason, there's something about books where the commercial impact of this medium is so relatively small, but the economy that exists around it, for example, in speaking, can be quite significant. So I wonder if you also have that feeling that...

• 1:09:28Derek Thompson?

  In the long run, and I don't know how much we should care about the long run, but in the long run, the books last in a way that almost nothing else does.

• 1:09:36Scott Galloway?

  Oh, yeah, the medium is the message. I can tell the medium through which someone has discovered my work, by the way they approach me. If a young dude comes up and high fives me and he's like, "Prop G, I've never seen a video." If someone comes up to me and starts speaking to me as if they're my friend, and I literally have to go, "If I met this person, I know it's a podcast." Podcast is very intimate, familial. If someone writes a very long email, or comes up to me and says, "I need to speak to you," and literally, like sometimes literally holds my hands, they've read the book. There's something, I don't know if it's because throughout history, only the most educated or religious figures had access to Gutenberg's printing press, that they associate the written work with

• 1:10:18Scott Galloway?

  something timeless and important. But no doubt about it, it's, and also, I have this trick. I always travel with two books. I sign them, and I stay at nice places all over the world. I sign them and say, "If inclined, please text message me your thoughts," and I put my phone number, and I write it in the front. And I leave the books wherever I go. I'll stay at somewhere, they always have these faux libraries with all these cool books, and I'll always just throw my book in there. I get text messages from people. "I read your book. This is what I liked. This is what I didn't like." If I'd left a magazine article and said, "Please contact me," no, no one's going to pull out a podcast we're doing from 2021 and listen to it again in 2031. But your kids are going to read

• 1:11:02Scott Galloway?

  your books, right? Your grandkids may read your books. So there is an enduring nature, a timeless immortality to books, hands down. So as we wrap up here, I would love, and this is a tactical question, I would love for you to help our listeners get their arms around Substack. You're new to Substack, you've made a big splash on it. It strikes me as kind of the medium of 2026 almost. I, I thought it was dying in 23 and 24, and then everybody, almost everybody I know, started building out their Substack. And of course, we're doing the same thing, and we're finding it takes a lot of time and energy and a little bit of money to add the features they say they have, but they don't actually have. And then to figure out a subscription model, what's in front of the wall, what's

• 1:11:47Scott Galloway?

  behind it. Help people get their arms around Substack. What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? What would you do differently?

• 1:11:55Derek Thompson?

  Substack's been wonderful to me. And, you know, for people who aren't familiar with edit, for people who are not familiar with it at all, it's a newsletter platform. You know, it's relatively easy to go on and create a name for your newsletter and then just start writing. And when you press the publish button, it goes out to everyone who subscribes the newsletter. And some people subscribe to a free version of the newsletter and some people subscribe to a paid version of the newsletter, which basically just means you can only read the article or the whole article if you pay, say, eight, $10 a month to that writer. I left The Atlantic after about 17 years of working at The Atlantic very happily. You know, you mentioned earlier that some people have complicated relationships with their editor. I-

• 1:12:37Scott Galloway?

  I'm sorry, you started The Atlantic when you were 22?

• 1:12:39Derek Thompson?

  I started The Atlantic when I was 22. Yeah. I was an intern for six months. I was a communications intern. My job, my job was to put together PowerPoints for what kind of websites The Atlantic could start.

• 1:12:50Scott Galloway?

  At 22, I was making bongs out of household items and you were at The Atlantic. Yeah. Yeah. God, that's ridiculous.

• 1:12:57Derek Thompson?

  Yeah. It was, I got very, very lucky. It was the only, this is 2008, this is the Great Recession. So it was very difficult to find a job then. I sent out maybe 30 letters to magazines and newspapers, New Yorker, New York, New York Times. Certainly if it had the words new and New York in them, I applied. Didn't get a call back from any of them. And The Atlantic was the only one that they called me back. I did a brief internship at Slate as well over the summer, but that was it. So I got very lucky. Left after 17 years, loved my 17 years there. And when I left, you know, I was, I was nervous because I thought that if I worked hard enough, I could probably earn as much on Substack as I did at The Atlantic. But I was worried that I'd be giving up-

• 1:13:43Derek Thompson?

  Readership. And one thing that I learned very quickly is that the Substack ecosystem has done a really good job through recommending writers to subscribers to other already popular writers, or having, encouraging young writers to appear on live videos with more established writers in that platform. It was maybe six weeks, eight weeks, before the average article that I wrote on Substack was receiving more, and sometimes even significantly more, audience than my typical article at The Atlantic, which might initially seem completely impossible because The Atlantic is much bigger and certainly more important than my little Substack. But because The Atlantic has a paywall, which limits some people's ability to read the typical

• 1:14:26Derek Thompson?

  Atlantic article, whereas I publish a lot entirely for free, I think I made it easier for more people to read my work. And so I don't feel like I've given up a lot on the reach front. So it's been a really uncomplicated win for me, honestly. I miss my editors. I miss the camaraderie and gossip of a newsroom. But from the standpoint of pure creation, it's unbeatable. I don't think Substack is for everyone in the journalism or media space.

• 1:14:58Scott Galloway?

  Do you have your podcast ad-free, or you're just, what's the value proposition and what's your pricing?

• 1:15:04Derek Thompson?

  Yeah, so the, well, the podcast with The Ringer is entirely free and ad-supported. And then the Substack is maybe one article that I'll write a week is free, and the other article that I write is paywall-protected. And what I tend to do is I'll, I'll put the paywall at a part of the article that is preceded by some kind of cliffhanger. So, for example, the article, "Why AI is a Bubble," is going to be an article where I have an interview with someone about why AI is a bubble. And at the moment, they're about to explain exactly how that bubble might burst. You put in the paywall and hope that that's going to get some people to pay to read the rest of the article. So I have a kind of cliffhanger strategy. And I'd say, and on a monthly basis, it's $8 a month and $80 a year to subscribe to my work.

• 1:15:43Scott Galloway?

  Do you think that was the right price, looking back? Do you think it's going to be higher or lower? That's the right price?

• 1:15:48Derek Thompson?

  Yeah, I think it'll probably, I've only been on Substack now for six months. So I think it might require a bit more time to have a really clear sense of what kind of pricing is optimal. I did very little research on this, other than just comparing the price of similar Substacks, and that's how I reached the $8 a month offering. But it's been wonderful. From a financial standpoint, it's been great. From a reach standpoint, it's been great. Substack is great for people who want to write. And the truth is that there's some writers who would really prefer to write once every two, three weeks, or even once a month, or twice a year. It doesn't mean they're bad. It doesn't mean they're bullshit. It just means that some people have a different metabolism or cadence to their writing. But for people who feel like they literally cannot stop the ideas popping out of their

• 1:16:31Derek Thompson?

  ears, Substack is the best place to be.

• 1:16:34Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I think it was invented for Heather Cox Richardson. She does 1,000 words a day, and my understanding is she's making somewhere between $10 and $15 million a year on Substack.

• 1:16:42Derek Thompson?

  She seems to be doing fine. Yeah, it's my understanding.

• 1:16:44Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, she's doing OK. But it's good. It's like, if Heather Cox Richardson is making a bunch of money, that's one of the few people I have absolutely no schadenfreude around. I think more power to her. Derek Thompson is one of the sharpest voices in media and politics. He's the co-author of Abundance, the host of the Plain English Podcast, and writes on Substack about culture, tech, and the economy, and is the father of two girls ages two months and two years. You are in the thick of, it gets better. It gets better, Derek.

• 1:17:13Derek Thompson?

  I appreciate that. I appreciate it. This is really fun. I appreciate you talking about this.

• 1:17:17Scott Galloway?

  Appreciate your time, Derek. Congratulations on everything.

• 1:17:24Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our associate producer is Laura Denayer. Kami Reek is our social producer. Jew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.

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