If I told you that there was a pill that would make you 10% happier for the next 15 minutes, I think a lot of people would take that pill. That pill is social connection. It makes us feel better to be around other people and to feel connected to other people, one 15-minute period of time after another after another after another. That's what life is. And so I feel like we are disconnecting ourselves from happiness when we disconnect ourselves from other people. I think we're locking ourselves out of real joy in a very finite life.
Good morning and welcome to our live Substack here. We're excited to be joined by a friend of the pod and one of the sharpest voices in media and politics. That's Derek Thompson. I don't want to say we discovered Derek just because, but I'd like to think that we're so much older than him and he's been so generous with his time. Derek, when did I first meet you? I think I went on your pod like 10 years ago.
That's right. I did a podcast with The Atlantic probably 10 years ago that was called Crazy Genius, and we had a conversation about the tech giants based around your — was it your first book, The Four?
Yeah. Yeah. I started late. Yeah.
Yeah. So we talked about Amazon and Google, and you had anatomical representations of each company, right? There was the head and the heart and maybe the groin or something.
Yeah, the gut and the genitals. Yeah, the head was Google's God. The heart was supposed to be Facebook, connection. The gut is Amazon, consumption, and the genitals are Apple, signaling your worth as a mate. But anyways, you were sort of an original gangster in this medium. As I think about it, you were doing podcasting before it was cool.
Yeah. Well, I felt like I was late to the game a little bit because I had been following Bill Simmons, who's been podcasting since, you know, the 1990s or something. But yeah, Crazy Genius was really fun, and that was a pure tech show. And that particular season, we really wanted to talk about the tech giants, and so it was just incredible to have someone who had written a book on it. And I remember talking to my producer when we had you on. She was like, 'That guy is awesome. Like he could have a potential in this medium.' I think you never know. So yeah,
you never know. Here we are 10 years later.
Better to be lucky than good.
It was either that I had a show on CNN Plus which got cancelled, so I just leaned into podcasting. So yeah, you never know. Failure sometimes opens a door. So, the way we're going to do it here, folks, is we're going to — I'm going to talk to Derek about this fantastic kind of term I like, and that is that we've entered the antisocial century, which foots to a lot of the things we talk about here. Derek and I are going to talk for about another 40 minutes, and then we're going to open it up and I'm going to read some audience questions here. All right, so let's bust right into it. Again, you've coined the idea of the antisocial century, which is a trend we cover a lot here. Your argument isn't that people are isolated against their will. It's that solitude became comfortable, cheap, and abundant, and people are actively opting for it. In other words, the problem may be that we don't feel lonely enough. How do you think this happened? Set the table here. What's the environment and the atmospherics for what you're calling the antisocial century?
Yeah, first off, I love that setup. I'm so glad that you got to the heart of this piece, which is trying to get at this idea that our crisis is not quite loneliness. In many ways, the crisis is the opposite of loneliness. It's that we don't feel that social cue to be lonely enough. So maybe the best way to think about the antisocial century is to juxtapose it with something like you could call the social century. For the first 50, 60 years of the 20th century, basically every indicator of social belonging and social capital was rising. People were spending more time with each other. They were starting more clubs. They belonged to unions. They had what are sometimes called more third places, like the bowling alleys that Robert Putnam famously wrote about. Putnam's book Bowling Alone is actually really remarkable to read now, even though it's now 26 years old. I mean, he has data about how frequently people are writing greeting cards to each other, how frequently they're calling each other on the phone or playing card games with each other, hosting cocktail parties. All of this was ascendant in the first 60 years of the 20th century. And then Putnam put his finger on this idea that in the last half of the 20th century all of this was declining, and every single indicator of socialization was declining at the same time. And so he publishes this book famously, Bowling Alone. And a lot of the sociological community comes out and says this is bollocks. Putnam doesn't know what he's talking about. And most importantly, he doesn't realize that we're on the verge of a revolution in socializing. That revolution is the internet. We're going to have these sort of new relationships with each other on the internet that are going to replace the declining relationships that we're having in the real world. And then 26 years after he publishes this book, which was so controversial for its thesis, every indicator again of socializing is going down. According to the American Time Use Survey, the average American spends 25% less time socializing presently in the real world. The American Time Use Survey asks about how often people attend or host parties. Americans under 25, Gen Z, spend 70% less time at parties than they did just 26 years ago, the year that Bowling Alone was published. So, it's like we've had a socializing recession on top of a socializing recession. And I call it the antisocial century because when I wrote this cover story for The Atlantic about a year and a half ago that itself was called The Antisocial Century, I read this really fascinating economic paper that was trying to summarize the most important social themes of the 20th century. And they said, you know, you've got the rise of female education, you've got the decline of the blue-collar workforce and the rise of the white-collar workforce. You've got delayed childbirth. It had all of these facts. And then I thought about, you know, what would it be like to write that same paper about the first 20-some years of the 21st century? What are the most important socioeconomic statistics? I thought, well, we're spending less time with each other. We're getting married less. We're dating less. We're coupling less. We're having fewer children. We have fewer friends. We spend more time in our homes and spend less time in public places. These are all antisocial trends. So, let's just get up and call it the antisocial century. And I've done a lot of writing after that initial cover story to sort of unpack what I consider some of the more surprising implications of the antisocial century on our lives, on the economy, and on politics.
And why should we care? What are the downsides of a culture becoming distinctly more antisocial? And also, are there any upsides?
Um, yeah, there are absolutely upsides. Let's start there. In many cases, as with so much modernity, we're victims of our own success. People have more freedom than they used to have. They're less bound by the strictures of tradition. You know, one place that people used to gather has been church or synagogue or temple. But there are lots of religious traditions that are bigoted, that are illiberal, that hold people back from being the individuals that they could be. So in many cases you could say that the antisocial century is about the triumph of individualism. But the triumph of individualism has its own costs. If you're disconnected from your family, if you focus on yourself rather than on your social community, if you focus on your career rather than on building a family, well, these can all give you a sense of power. But in the long run, what are you left with? A really ample bank account and a not-so-ample social life. So the reason why I think this is important, let's talk about two reasons. One that's very individual, happiness, and another that's more macro, which is politics. Individually, it seems pretty clear according to research that's been done by a lot of different people, especially at the University of Chicago, that people — how to put this — overdemand introversion. If you ask people, how much time do you want to spend alone? People actually tend to want to spend a lot of time alone. They often feel burned out. They want to feel they want to, you know, watch their own Netflix and scroll their own TikTok in bed or on a couch. But there's some really interesting studies, for example, that have asked people in commutes in Chicago or New York. They've said, 'Do you think you want to talk to a stranger during your commute?' And pretty much everyone says, 'Fuck no. Like, please don't make me talk to a stranger on my commute. That sounds like something close to hell.' But then they incentivize it. They offer some people some money to participate in a trial and they randomize some people to talk to strangers. And at the end of this train ride, they asked people, the ones who talked to strangers and the ones who didn't talk to strangers, how do you feel right now? How happy do you feel? And the people who have been in some cases forced a little bit maybe against their will to socialize just a little bit more than they might have initially demanded are consistently happier than those who spent time just locked into themselves. And so one conclusion from this, I think, is that we overdemand solitude in one day. That's not particularly significant, but over time that adds up because if I told you that there was like a pill that would make you 10% happier for the next 15 minutes to an hour, I think a lot of people would take that pill. That pill is social connection. It makes us feel better to be around other people and to feel connected to other people. And so what I say toward the end of the initial cover story is, yeah, you could argue that this experiment on the Chicago commuter rail on the L, it only increased someone's happiness for one 15-minute period of time. But life is just one 15-minute period of time after another after another after another. That's what life is. And so I feel like we are disconnecting ourselves from happiness when we disconnect ourselves from other people. 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 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, you know, 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.
I want to come back to politics in a second, but I'll put forward a thesis. To say we're less happy, which I think there's a ton of evidence, including you live longer when you're more social. But let's talk a little bit. Let's explore the downside. I'll put forward a thesis. I worry that isolation is directly correlated to — I'm going to use a non-academic term — going crazy. And that is if you put an orca, put a mammal alone, you isolate any mammal, an orca, a dog, it starts to go crazy. And that other people in relationships create guardrails and checkpoints, make you feel better about something you express in real life, something you're worried about. It helps soothe those fears. And that other relationships and people are guardrails against starting to believe that, oh, mRNA vaccines alter your DNA, or believing that, oh, this, you know, crazy theory, or immigrants are taking my jobs. It just feels as if people start to lose not only connection, but the Overton window expands beyond something that is healthy. That especially young men, we literally start to go, I mean, for lack of a better term, very antisocial in not a good way. Are we going crazier, more prone to conspiracy theory, more anger, more angry? And you talked about this. I hadn't thought about the fact that young men aren't more political. Sounds like you're saying they want some sort of stimulation that maybe they're not getting if they were socializing. But talk about the mental impact of spending way more time alone.
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. You know, where is that really going to cost them? They might not — people who are isolated like this, they might not feel like it costs them so much in a typical Tuesday or Wednesday. You know, they wake up, they maybe, you know, do a workout, they go to work, they come home, they gamble a little bit on the couch, they watch some Netflix, they go to sleep. Maybe they feel like that's a perfectly stimulating life. But life isn't just Netflix and work. Life is often tragedy. Life is often losing a job, losing a parent, dealing with a mental health crisis. And in those moments, not having a social group to fall back on, that is the real risk. It's interesting you mentioned two things in your windup. You mentioned socialization and you mentioned vaccines. And there's a way in which those ideas connect in a weird way. You can almost think of socialization as a kind of vaccine against a certain kind of isolating misery. Like why do you get a vaccine? Do you get a vaccine in order to help you when you're at your healthiest? No, you get a vaccine so that in the worst case you don't get COVID, measles, rubella, etc. So, while I think friendship is like delightful in its own intrinsic sense, like I love getting drinks with my friends. I love playing board games with my friends. I love hanging out with my wife. It's also the case that maybe the ultimate payoff of social connection isn't just sharing a martini on a Tuesday night. It's that moment when your parents die, when your sister won't talk to you, when your boss is being terrible to you, when you've lost your job. These kind of — you can almost call them like moments of social illness when what you need is the equivalent of a social vaccine to inoculate you against the inevitable misery that every single person is going to feel in this world, in this life. So that to me is the real cost of not exercising the friendship muscle. It's like being with friends is awesome, but when you really, really need people who understand and love you, like when you're in those deep and dark moments, that's where the biggest payoff of friendship can come. And if you haven't been investing in these kind of relationships, then you are entirely on your own at the very moment that you need to be surrounded by love.
I'm in Los Angeles at a hotel with a beautiful roof deck. And I got in, checked in, went upstairs to this roof deck. And there's this amazing bar overlooking all of Beverly Hills and Hollywood. And I thought, why aren't — it's such a beautiful night. Why aren't more young people here with friends, quite frankly, drinking, socializing, meeting each other? Just such an incredible setting. And then I ordered one drink and I got the bill and with tip it was 30 bucks. And I thought, okay, that's one reason. Talk a little bit about the economic challenges or the economic forces that are correlated to antisocialization.
There's this wonderful idea in economics. It's called Baumol's cost disease. Maybe you've talked a little bit about it, but it's this idea from a late economist, William Baumol, who said that ironically in an economy where some parts of the economy are getting more productive, other parts of the economy are going to get more expensive. So for example, if you have a growing economy where everyone's getting richer and like an early industrial revolution, but a string quartet is still a string quartet, still a string quartet, which is not being made more labor productive by any kind of technology, then going to see a symphony or going to see an opera is going to get much more expensive than anything else. So the cost disease essentially says that as technology changes an economy, parts of that economy that are more labor intensive are going to increase in cost relative to the rest of the economy. To put that in simpler terms, as our phones and digital entertainment has gotten dirt cheap, the physical world has gotten relatively expensive. It is cheap to stay at home on your couch and watch Netflix and cheaper still to forget Netflix, not even pay for a subscription, and instead just scroll through TikTok. That is a zero additional cost experience. Going to a rooftop deck in Beverly Hills to order, let's say, you know, three drinks between you and a friend, that could cost you $100 even before you talk about maybe Ubering out there and Ubering back. And so, it's absolutely true, and I love that you foregrounded this. It's absolutely true that one barrier here is that the physical world is getting more expensive relative to the digital world because the digital world has been inflected by technology that the physical world has not. Right? There is no computer chip revolution for mixing the perfect martini. The martini is still a martini and it's shaken by human hands. So I think that a big problem here is that people aren't getting out of the room because they feel almost pulled into the comfort, the relatively cheap comfort that the room provides. I think another part of this to sort of, you know, pull in some ideas from my other work from last year, Abundance, is that, you know, if the first half of the 20th century was about technology mastering the physical world, the first half of the 21st century has been about escaping the physical world because it is so regulated. Right? We've made it much harder to build things. We made it harder to build houses and so young people can't afford them and then therefore they can't start families and maybe there's a decline in socialization because of that. If it's harder to build things in the physical world, then the physical world will mechanically become more expensive. And so people will stay inside and rather than take risks in the world of, you know, flesh and blood, you know, try to meet girls, try to meet guys. Instead the risks that they take are the cheap thrill risks of staying on your couch and betting on Kalshi or, you know, some sports betting app. And so I think that there are ways in which you can absolutely tell a story that economic forces have changed human behavior and even changed what is an appropriate way to spend your free time, right? It is now considered cool or permissive to, rather than socialize in the physical world, stay home, text a couple people, scroll on TikTok, and place a few bets.
And you have this great framing. You have a theory or you had a piece laying out sort of the effect on young men and you describe them as monks in the casino. What do you mean by that?
Well, so yeah. Let's take each part. Monks. What do we think about when we think about monks? We think about devout religious often men who spend time in a monastery, looking at a finite number of scripts and texts and filling their life with these ideas that they can hold in their hands rather than venturing out into the world and experiencing it in a kind of flesh and blood way. Today's monks are not religious. They are secular monks and rather than hold traditional scriptures in their hands, they hold of course a smartphone. And so I think that a lot of young men today are essentially behaving like monks. But what makes this particularly strange is that, you know, it's a weird juxtaposition to imagine a monk in a casino. But when you think about what people are doing on their phones, increasingly they're gambling. The average young man now spends significantly more time gambling than he spends reading. I think more than 50% of men were active on betting markets in the last 6 months. And we see that, you know, the costs are not just to their time, that, you know, default rates and bankruptcy rates seem to rise in states that admit gambling on phones. And so you have this incredibly strange phenomenon where people are choosing to be alone and then enter into highly risky behavior rather than enter into that kind of risky behavior outside of their home. Right? They are introducing themselves to fewer women. They're trying to make fewer friends. They're having sex less. They're driving less. Everything that requires some amount of gumption outside of one's room, that is declining. But everything that involves risk that you can do inside of your room, that is rising. And so that is the phenomenon of the monk in the casino. They're not even entering the physical casino. The casino is perfectly outfitted for their own room. And that again is of course what makes them monks.
Yeah. We describe it simply as young men need to take more risks offline and less risks online. And Jimmy Carr, who I've just — I'm obsessed with, he basically says men should gamble more, but then he goes on to say start a business, you know, kind of gamble your time, gamble your life, but don't gamble online. What do you think the idea — it strikes me that people or young men take so much risk online in terms of what they say, the things they're willing to believe, how much they spend. Is there a certain amount of risk, a pool of risk that we're willing to take and we've just transferred it from offline to online? Have you thought specifically about risk and the levels of risk and it's just a kind of a distribution problem?
Yeah, I mean that's almost exactly the way I think about it. I think of it as almost a clean transference of the risk impulse outside of one's home or room toward the risk impulse being entirely cultivated and spent, so to speak, inside of one's room. And I mean, I'm obsessed with this phenomenon and there's a bunch of different places to take it. I remember at the end of that essay about monks in the casino, I become really interested in this inversion of risk where I think I was talking to someone about this phenomenon and they said, you know, the sociologist, the early 20th century sociologist Max Weber had this idea that it was Christianity that gave birth to capitalism and Christian asceticism in particular, this idea that, you know, Puritans wanted to save money that could then be pulled and then that saved money could be invested in other enterprises and that was the foundation of capitalism. But in a way what we're seeing now is an entire inversion of that principle because it is capitalism that is giving birth to a kind of wretched asceticism. That is to say like the casino economy is turning our young people into monks and like that is an unbelievably strange and fascinating phenomenon to me. And again it's not just fascinating, I think it is fundamentally sad. It is fundamentally sad. Even if you like gambling, even if you think that Kalshi is like the most interesting and wonderful invention in the last 20 years, it's sad to me because the research that we have says so strongly that we tend to overvalue and overdemand solitude when we are given solitude as an opportunity. That to underinvest in relationships, to spend less time with other people, to date less, to become less comfortable around other people is not only depriving ourselves of wonderful conversations and wonderful, you know, 15-minute after 15-minute experiences, but it is also again depriving ourselves of that ability to, you know, inoculate ourselves against the miseries that inevitably occur in life when what we really need is a community of people around us to help us.
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Let's talk a little bit about solves or solutions. I mean it just feels whether it's remote work, a decline in church attendance, people remote schooling, where we got very used to isolation, and then I would argue the one thing we haven't discussed, it's just almost an indomitable foe, is that arguably 40% of the S&P has an economic incentive to figure out a way for you to every day spend one more second on a screen and one less with other people. What could we do if people — I think people are going to nod their heads and say, 'All right, it just makes a lot of sense.' If you're a parent and you see what happens when your kid isn't around other kids for an extended period of time, we can't even take a vacation without having other kids around our kids. They just become so awful. What are some of the solves here? Or if you were advising around public policy or even around parenting, how do we address this?
The first step is recognizing exactly what's being lost, right? When a society is pushing people to take only financial risks and to not take social risks or enterprise risks, you know, starting a company, you are hollowing out the virtues that make strong collective life possible. You're hollowing out trust, curiosity, forgiveness, generosity. Like that's the receipt of our behavior. And we don't see it when we're alone because we don't see what's being lost when we're with other people. And so I think that like it's one way to solve this is for people to take responsibility, right? Like how do you solve a problem like smoking, right? Well, you have the surgeon general make an announcement that says that we have now connected smoking to cancer. So, you know, one thing you could do is you could say, you know, we banned advertisements for smoking and that was powerful. But I think the knowledge itself, like the information itself that smoking was clearly connected to cancer, that was its own lever on reducing smoking. Right? People today, even if they choose to smoke, they do so knowing the risk. They don't need to see or not see an ad for like Camel cigarettes to know what the relationship between smoking and their long-term lung health is. So, a huge part of this for me is just like public awareness. You mentioned earlier in the show that like there's now evidence and I think Kara has pointed to this as well that social connection seems to correlate really, really strongly with health, with longevity, and in particular a lot of this research comes out of Northwestern University with memory in our 80s and 90s. It might be the case in fact that the reason that like memory's original purpose before, you know, memorizing abstract ideas and mathematics, that memory's original purpose was social. It was to keep track in your tribe of like who's nice and who's duplicitous, who's strong and who's trustworthy, right? Gossip essentially is the original purpose of memory. And so it makes sense that as we surround ourselves with social connection, we are working out those sort of original sort of gossip muscles that make us better at remembering all sorts of things for work and life. And so making these connections, giving people a sense of what is actually being lost, making them realize that getting a good night's sleep and, you know, working out, eating your vegetables, like all that's important, but socializing might be just as important as going to the gym. Like social fitness isn't just a metaphor. Like socializing makes our brains fit. Teaching people about this I think is its own power. But the other thing that I think cities have to do and this again comes back to Abundance is to invest more in physical infrastructure. You know, find ways to build parks, find ways to build more homes so that we can allow people to move out of their parents' house and into their own place, that we can give them places to socialize that aren't just in their basements and in their rooms. So some of this I think is a physical infrastructure investment problem and some of it is just a knowledge problem. I think people are choosing loneliness — or choosing aloneness, I should say — not knowing what exactly is being lost.
