Derek Thompson: Negativity Bias

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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm delighted to bring back, it's been a while, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson. He writes about big trends in tech, culture, and politics.
I'm a huge fan of his Plain English podcast with The Ringer. And he's here with us today.
What's going on, man? How's it going, man? It's great to be here. All right.
Here's my plan for the pod. I'm fanboying for Plain English.
So hopefully you get some new listeners out of this. What I want to do is you have these deep dive conversations on your show about cultural trends, things going on in our political, sociological overlapping areas.
And I want to do a clip show. Remember the 90s? Where we do a sitcom clip show.
We do a little bit of each topic. And if people's whistle is wet and they want more, they can go back to the longer convos or articles.
Does that good i love it that sounds fantastic thank you let's do it okay the first one actually might be against my trend because i don't know if you had you have you done this i did this was responsive to a tweet of yours not one of the shows but um the question of the economic perception versus the reality it's obviously something that we're talking about a lot here because of its impact on

the presidential election in 2024. Many people have seen the Harris poll.
56% say U.S. is in recession.
Actually, seven straight quarters of positive growth. 49% say stocks are down year to date.
We're having stock markets at record highs. 49% say unemployment's at a 50-year high.
Actually, we're at a 50-year low. So, Derek, what do you make of that as an observer of the human condition? I think there's a lot of things happening at the same time.
And let me try to list as many of these things happening at the same time as I can possibly remember them. The first thing that's happening is that we had a bout of inflation, which is incredibly unique for living Americans.
We haven't really had any inflation like this for 40 years, which means that if you're really younger than say 50 years old, you have no living memory of anything like this. And inflation does bad things to people.
It makes them really, really upset when they can't afford groceries, they can't afford houses, they can't afford cars. Every single time they see a receipt, they get mad.
We haven't had this experience in a while. And so inflation makes people mad in a way that other negative economic indicators don't make people mad.
I feel it. I am deeply annoyed still.
And I don't want to be, but I am. Like when I go to the grocery store, or when I get a hotel room or whatever, I get deeply annoyed from time to time.

And that's because the long tail of inflation is different than the long tail of something like unemployment. When the unemployment rate drops from, let's say, 10% to 4%, well, that means that that 6% of the population that got a job, well, they have a job now.
They're doing okay. They can make ends meet.
But when inflation, which is a measure of the first derivative, falls from 10% to 3.5%, that means prices are still rising on top of the 10% inflation that happened last year. So I want to begin at least this part of the segment by saying I do have a lot of sympathy for people who are frustrated at prices and are in particular frustrated at rates because mortgage rates or car loan rates or credit card rates are really high.
And that's because the Federal Reserve raised rates in order to fight inflation. Now, that said, there is absolutely a mismatch between perceptions and reality.
And the second thing you said in that when you were listing all the various ways that Americans are wrong in their perceptions of this economy, the second might be the most interesting to me. The fact that roughly half of Americans think that the stock market is down is astonishing.
Something like 60 to 70% of Americans own stock. They don't need to go to Barron's or the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times.
They don't need to trust the big bad media to tell them if the stock market is up or down. They can go to fidelity.
They can go look at their own investment accounts and see, am I up or down? The fact that half of Americans are telling pollsters that stocks are down at a moment when they're actually at their all-time high suggests to me that there is a lot of biased affect in these responses. A lot of Americans are just mad and they are associating or painting every single fact about the economy with their anger.
That's the second thing that I think is really important. The third thing that I think is really important to say is that historically, Americans' attitudes toward the economy shape their attitudes toward politics.
If the economy is good, I like the incumbent. If the economy is bad, I don't like the incumbent.
Today, I think that's flipped. I think that people's politics shapes their sense of the economy.
And you see this in the trends. When the University of Michigan asked Democrats and Republicans just before Donald Trump became president, how's the economy doing? The second Trump becomes president, Republicans swing toward this is the best economy ever.
And the second Donald Trump leaves the office, they swing to this is the worst economy ever. And so a lot of this is, again, partisan affect driving survey responses.
But it's important, I think, to keep all this on the table. Inflation high rates suck.
And there's a general sort of negativity vibe in the American population. And number three, partisan politics is driving these survey responses.
How do you talk to people about their experiences and try to break through when you're having conversations? We do plenty of this on what should Joe Biden say about this. And so I guess that's a sub part of the question.
But I'm talking about people in our lives. Like I got into like an actual fight yesterday with somebody who was like, you're just being an avocado toast eating elite and like, whatever you're in your bubble.
And, and, you know, because I was like, look, it's objectively untrue that the economy is bad. Like I get that it's annoying.
But it's just not bad. Like it's annoying for some people there's like in any time there's just if you're on a fixed income, like inflation is gonna hit you hard, There's certainly some people for whom it's not bad.
Like, it's annoyed. For some people, there's, like, in any time, if you're on a fixed income, like, inflation is going to hit you hard, right? There's certainly some people for whom it's particularly bad.
That's true at any point. But, like, as an objective measure right now, it's not you're just annoyed because you're not used to paying X amount for Y product.
But, like, that makes people bristle. And so I do wonder how you think, you know, you can talk about that in a way that might nudge people a little bit into the light of reality.
Let's start with understanding something, and I think it's really complex and hard to talk about. When we say something like the economy is good, or the economy is bad, it's an incredibly abstract statement.
It's almost like saying America is good, or America is bad. What do you do to someone who says that? Well, you say, what part? America is Taylor Swift and the NFL.
It's Republicans and it's Democrats. It's lefties and Marxists and it's MAGA-rightists.
It's all of it. And the same really is true for an economy.
Sometimes people will say, don't tell me the stock market is up. The stock market isn't the economy, to which I always say, yes, but it's a part of it.
And we can say to some people, unemployment has been below 4% for the longest period of time since the 1960s. And that's a part of the economy, but it's not all of it.
Inflation has been relatively high relative to the prices they were four years ago. That's a part of the economy, but it's not all of it.
And so I do think that one of the difficult things about persuading somebody that something like the economy is good when they think the economy is bad, is it's just like having a conversation with someone who thinks America is bad when you think America is good. Everyone in this economy is experiencing a part of what makes it strong.
Unemployment is low. There's productivity growth.
The stock market is at an all time high. It's easy to find work.
And if you have money that's invested, it's a really good economy for you. And also, yes, prices and rates are absolutely higher than they were four years ago.
It really is a question of attention. It's a question of focus.
What are you choosing to describe when you say the economy is bad? And in terms of what Joe Biden should say, I mean, we don't need to go all the way into this. I think one of the difficult things about Joe Biden making a counterintuitive case right now is that Joe Biden at the moment, I don't think can persuade anybody of anything.
Right. I think Joe Biden has been an effective president, but I don't think he is very effective at running for president.
That's a different job than filling the office. He's not a very effective campaigner right now.
He is very old. And so if Americans are going to be persuaded, if the economy is good, that persuasion is not going to flow from the Oval Office.
It's going to flow from some changes in real conditions, including, hopefully, real wages continuing to rise faster than prices. Is there anything they could do if Jared Bernstein called you? He was like, Derek, we've got five months to juice this or to depress it.
I don't know what the right approach is. Is there anything that would hop to mind for you? I ask almost every single economist and political thinker this question on my podcast.
I know. I was hoping you were going to take the best of those answers and provide me a synthesis.
Well, here's the problem. The problem is that if you asked me a year ago, then we could talk about deficit reduction.
We could talk about certain things that you could do with releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. You could talk about things that could allay prices in the medium term.
Sure. There is no medium term.
Right. The election is November and economies don't move at the speed of light.
Economies evolve over a long period of time, and especially things like overall prices and overall wages move extremely slowly. There is no lever to change prices and rates very quickly.
You know, the unfortunate answer here is, and truly, I'm not a particularly pessimistic person generally, but I am pessimistic about the idea that Jared Bernstein and the Council of Economic Advisors and the White House itself, I am pessimistic about the idea that there exists some secret button that they could push that will dramatically change people's sense of the economy. Here's what we should hope for.
What we should hope for is that stock prices slow down a little bit and prices moderate a lot and the federal reserve cuts interest rates maybe twice god even three times before november what that would do is something like the following it would combine declining prices with declining rates and with declining rates mortgages would be more affordable cars be more affordable credit card debt would. Static crisis, declining increase in prices.
Prices wouldn't actually decline. That's right.
But the rates would decline for mortgages and cars and credit card debt. And that would make people feel richer if they felt like they could afford the big ticket items in life.
Then maybe they'd spend more money and that would help keep inflation persisting. So it's a tough call.
That's exactly right. It's exactly right.
And this is the problem with inflation. It's always been the devilish problem with inflation is that if you get inflation undercover, if you bring down interest rates, it's going to stimulate economic activity, which stimulates spending, which stimulates even higher prices.
A related question, and this is not really for Joe Biden, but a broader problem that is similar in its challenge is related to housing. You and I are totally aligned on this.
I'm of the view that the short housing supply is upstream from a lot of our other problems. You wrote recently about America's magical thinking about housing and specifically about the city of Austin, which has done the right thing, built a lot of new homes.
I believe the stat that you used was that they've built homes at nine times a faster rate than San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego. That might be something for Gavin Newsom to look at when he's not on TV.
And yet, now people aren't happy about that because rents are falling, there's some vacant buildings. Talk about that, the challenge that we have with ever-increasing housing prices, but the fact that there are huge constituencies, including voting constituencies, of people that don't want to do the things that would bring housing prices down.
Housing is such an interesting issue. And I think it's particularly interesting to think about housing from along two different axes.
One is housing owners versus people outside the market. And the second is to think of it through time, the present versus the future.
So right now we have a situation where because housing is such an important part of many people's savings, you have home voters, you have people who vote on the fact that their home is the most important part of their retirement portfolio. And if your home is the most important part of your retirement portfolio, and you perceive that an increase in supply will moderate the inflation of your home value, which is absolutely valid, then you are encouraged in a somewhat rational way to discourage people around you from building more houses.
And that is a local rational selfishness that cashes out in bad outcomes for everyone. Because more housing density is good for fixing the affordability crisis.
It's good for productivity. It's good for innovation.
It makes people happier. It makes people healthier to have more dense housing.
There are so many benefits from an increase in dense housing supply. How does it make people healthier? They walk more? People walk more, absolutely, in cities than they do in suburbs and exurbs.
And a huge part of, I think, declining longevity in America is an increase in cardiovascular diseases and diabetes that comes from the fact that Americans walk less than residents of almost any other industrialized country. Most industrialized countries, especially in Western Europe and places like Japan, you know, think about Hong Kong, Singapore.
These are dense areas where people drive much less. There's some evidence that suggests that Japanese people walk about 70% more in terms of steps per day than Americans.
Americans have the lowest longevity of basically any rich industrialized country in the world. That makes no sense because in general, longevity tends to correlate with income.
So I was dilating on the answer, but basically it is a big deal that Americans don't walk as much. And I think a huge part of the fact that we don't walk as much is because of our built environment.
But we're talking about housing here. And the other point that I wanted to make is the difference between sort of present and future markets.
I was talking to a friend in Beverly Hills, who was saying that he was very angered by the fact that there was construction going on down the street from his Beverly Hills home. And it was really making me upset that they were trying to build more houses in Beverly Hills.
And I asked this gentleman about how his kids were doing in terms of trying to find a house in Los Angeles because his kid and their families were looking to buy in Los Angeles. Is this Bill Simmons? No, it's not Bill Simmons.
No, no, I'm not blowing a Bill Simmons spot on it. I would have cut it if it actually wasn't Bill Simmons.
I thought I did see on the internet that he was selling a house recently. Anyway, go ahead.
I have no knowledge of Bill Simmons' real estate portfolio, but this was not Bill Simmons, I promise you. But I was asking this gentleman about the buying experience of his children in Los Angeles, and he goes, oh, it's terrible.
There's nowhere for my kids to live. And I was like, do you understand the gap between statements one and two, the frustration at current housing construction and the lack of future housing supply? A lot of people are a little bit like a dog that wants to play fetch with a ball, but won't let you grab the ball out of its mouth, like doesn't understand that a part of the process of fetch is releasing their, you know, mandibles that you can grip the ball.
When people hope for their children to be able to buy a house, a part of that wish, a part of that game is releasing your grip on nimbyism and allowing housing to be built. And so it's not just one law or another that we need to fix in this country.
It's an entire culture of housing abundance. Are there any good lessons from Austin, the Austin experience, like how they made it happen, how they broke red tape? Is there anything that stood out for you as you looked at that? There's absolutely good lessons from across Texas, where lower regulations and less zoning just makes it easier in general to build.
But it's also important to say, I think that there's no silver bullet here. You can't just fix one zoning law or another.
You can't just fix one permitting law or another. You need an entire culture and you need labor supply and you need financing.
It's only when all these things come together that you really get housing abundance. Austin was in a sweet spot.
They had low regulations. They had an easier permitting system.
They also had a lot of developers who could find financing and they had the construction supply in order to actually finish these houses that got started. Because one thing we've seen in the last few years is a lot of housing starts, but a longer backlog for actually completing some of these apartments.
You know, for the clip show, you should go listen to Derek's many upsets on housing. But I did a full interview with your colleague, Jerusalem Dempsis, on this a while back.
I'll put it in the show notes. She's awesome.
We did a full hour on this question. She's fantastic.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Bachelor Happy Hour.
I'm Joe. And I'm Serena.

And we are here with the iHeart Music Awards

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Who are sponsoring this podcast and we are so grateful

to them. Thank you.
Thank you for finishing my

sentence. And we are here with our favorites

Dotton and Charity. Where were you

in bikinis in the snow? Montana.

Okay, she flew out and

joined you guys. Isn't it cold?

No, it was. Well, yeah, it's it was, we literally, we risk getting hypothermia

for those photos. Wow.
They were sick though.

I don't get bikinis in the snow.

It's just like an aesthetic.

I don't know. If him and I did

that, if we did

Speedos in the snow, you guys

would be like douchebags. No, I wouldn't.

Well, Speedos in the snow would be hilarious. Oh, really?

I would be like, let's see it.

Come on.

I would not complain. I'd beg him to do stuff like douchebags.
No, I wouldn't. Well, Speedos in the Snow would be hilarious.
I would be like, let's see it. Come on.
I would not complain. I'd beg him to do stuff like that.
He's like, no. That's going to be the name of this podcast episode.
Bachelor Happy Hour, Speedos in the Snow. David's Bridal, if you're listening.
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Okay, right turn. I want to move into cults.
You have a recent article called The Unchurched, the True Cost of the Church Going Bust. I would like to connect that with an obsession of yours about what seemed like a culture of cults that we have in this country around our politics, around crypto, around a bunch of other stuff.
And I guess I'll just kind of let you cook on those subjects and we'll see where the conversation takes us. I mentioned two phenomena that I guess are tributaries into the river of my interest in cults.
One is the decline of religion in America. I'm not particularly religious myself, but I do think that America has historically relied on religion more than almost any other similarly rich industrialized country.
And I'm very curious about what happens to the American identity as religion goes away for people. What do we fill that vacuum with? That's one question I'm very interested in.
Another question I'm very interested in is what happens when you get a super abundance of supply in a particular industry like media? And a theory that I have about the riotous amount of competition in media is that more competition in media means more antagonism. So for instance, if you and I were going to start a new media company, the first thing we'd probably try to do is to point out why this media company is essential in the first place.
Aren't there enough podcasts? Aren't there enough newsletters? Aren't there enough magazines? We would have to, as a new entrant in a very crowded space, point out how everybody else is wrong about the world. And that's why people have to listen to us.
And this idea of people breaking away from a mainstream and creating a private sense of identity that disagrees strongly with mainstream culture,

this historically is something very close to that which we have thought of as a cult identity. And so I think that one thing that's happening in media and maybe in many other media adjacent areas is that the logic of cults is beginning to colonize our experience of American life.
And again, when I think of a cult, I think of a nascent emerging movement that has a private set of rules or norms. And one of those rules or norms is a direct and specific indictment of the mainstream, right? So cults, I think of as being very high trust internally and low trust externally.
And when you think about the decline of trust in American institutions, especially on the right, I think what you have is a kind of cult mentality. And so in politics, in media, and maybe even in aspects of the end of religion, I just do think that this logic of cults is ascended.
I want to put the church, the unchurched question over there and come back to it for a second, because I do think it's related. But on this exact point, since we're both in media, and it's something I think about a lot too, the parallel I always come back to and I've used a couple of times, I think, on the show is when we were growing up with the 80s and 90s, if you go to the grocery store, you know, we're still buying periodicals right there, you know, at the register, you know, they had the tabloids, right.
You know, whatever. Hillary Clinton has a love child, you know, aliens come, you know, have inhabited Michael Jackson's body, whatever.
And the economist, et cetera, if it was there at all was over in the aisle somewhere in the periodical section. periodical section.
And there's a reason for that. It's human nature, right? Humans are more interested in things that are titillating or gossip or contrary to what is common view.
And that was managed, I feel like, in a way, in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, because people were getting information from other places too, right? They might buy The Inquirer, but then they go go home and watch the news but now when it's in your phone and it's like a constant competition like do i click on this tiktok or that one this youtube or that one and one youtube is everyone's out to get you the elites are terrible everything you've heard is wrong let me tell you the truth and then the other thing is like well you know it's complicated it's nuanced like joe biden's facing some tough challenges here There are good points on this side and that side. Like people are going to click on the former.
And so I think that those two instincts, like the human instinct to be drawn to something contrarian and conspiratorial with what you're talking about is the kind of the need for the producers of that material to, you know, in order to be successful in a competitive set, like those two things seem to be working together in our disfavor. And I'm not really sure how to unravel it.
You remind me of a paper that was published in 2010 that I was just reading for some reporting that I'm doing right now. It's a paper that's called What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from US Daily Newspapers.
And the economists who wrote it were Matthew Genskow and Jesse M. Shapiro.
I think people can just look this up. It's the PDF I'm looking at.
It was available online. This is a paper that looked at the question of, essentially, where does media bias come from? I think some media critics say that media bias comes from owners.
If your owner is conservative, then their newspaper is going to be conservative. If the owner is liberal, then their newspaper is going to be conservative.
It's liberal, excuse me. All right.
Well, maybe that's one possibility. Maybe you could say media bias comes from reporters preferences, right? It comes from the biases of reporters.
And this paper looked at some evidence and ran some surveys and their conclusion was no, actually firms respond most strongly to consumer preferences, consumer audience preferences drive media bias more than ownership or reporter bias. This is, I think, one of the hardest things for casual media consumers to understand.
Lots of what we hate about the media is as much the audience's fault as it is the media's fault. Now, people always hate it when I say that.
JVL will love that though. My colleague will really appreciate that.
Anything that blames the people, he'll like. So we can pull that out for him.
People hate it when I say this because they think that I'm letting the media off the hook. And that's not what I'm doing.
What I'm saying is popular media, popular news media is a co-production. We, the journalists are producing information that we hope you, the audience will like.
And the more accurate our feedback mechanisms are in terms of audience behavior, the more we see exactly what podcasts you listen to and exactly how long you listen to those podcasts and exactly what headline you'll click on. And if we offer you 17 different headlines, what is your rank order of headlines one through 17? What kind of headlines you'd like to click on than others? The sharper that feedback loop, the more the news media comes to be a kind of mirror held up to audience preferences.
And that's happening to media right now. We are becoming, we are much more sophisticated in our ability to understand what is it that audiences want.
Audiences want negativity. Bad is more powerful than good.
It's an evolutionary fact of attention that we pay more attention to bad things in our environment than good things. This keeps us alive.
The fact of a poison berry is more important than the fact of a beautiful blade of grass. Negativity bias is one of the most fundamental biases that shapes media today.
And if people are upset at the media for being too negative, they should look in the mirror and think about what articles am I clicking on? What podcasts am I listening to? What stories am I sharing and how am I sharing them? Because I'll bet that if audiences, like myself, I share the same negativity bias. I'm as human as anyone else I'm describing in the audience.
I think if audiences paid really close attention to their behavior, they would see how powerful negativity bias shapes the way they interact with the news. And they should go that next step further and say, if every media organization that I interact with had a perfect understanding of how much I love negative catastrophizing news, wouldn't they just keep serving up negative catastrophizing news in order to get and keep my attention? The answer is yes.
So I'm not trying to make it oversimple. It is complicated.
Media is a co-production between producers and consumers. But a huge piece of this is that the smarter media companies get, the more negative media, quote, ought to become because negativity is a reflection of consumer preference.
All right. Well, I'm going to give the consumer what they want here because I'm ready to catastrophize in response to that i am with you i think that on the individual level people once they become aware of this can be more thoughtful about their media choices at a group level this is getting worse before it gets better because we're coming into a time where not only do we know more and more about user inputs but we'll be able to have computers and supercomputers and artificial intelligence tell us exactly what, not only tell us exactly what our reader or viewer wants, but be able to just create it and give it to them actually without very much human involvement.
And so I'm curious what you think that world looks like and what the dangers are of the world we're heading to with AI driven, you know, confirmation bias super machines. The first answer I have is I have no idea.
I don't know what a world that is more generative and algorithmic looks like. But I would have to think that if the question underneath your question is, what does a purely algorithmic news media look like? The answer is buried here in the present.
It's something like TikTok, right? TikTok is probably the most sophisticated AI in curating and organizing news information. And I'm not familiar with too many really rigorous studies of news on TikTok.
But from at least my pinhole vantage point, it seems like a perfect explanation of the trends that I'm talking about. It seems like a lot of people recognizing that highly ideological news that identifies an enemy, catastrophizes the danger of that enemy, and holds oneself up as the true arbiter of truth against a world of lying imbeciles, that's a really successful way of getting and keeping people's attention.
And again, I think that that's not only negativity biased, I also think it's a little bit culty. The idea that everybody is wrong, that I am right, is a really powerful idea in the history of cults.
And I also see it consistently as a really powerful idea in news media. Yeah, the TikTok, I wish I was trying to pull it up.
Maybe you saw this news today, too. If not, I'll grab it and post and put it in the show notes.
But there's a study today about young people's view of America and of elites and institutions in the world. And it's just overwhelmingly negative.
And, you know, some of that I think is related to the facts on the ground. We haven't had a ton of huge successes at the institutional level during the Iraq War financial crisis Trump years.
Some of it, I think, also is obviously this information silo that is just hyper-negative, hyper-contrarian, hyper-tearing down of everything without much pushback from the other side. I would agree with all of that.

And I would say further that it's possible that what we get with generative AI and a more AI inflected news ecosystem is not an extension of the trends that we see with things like TikTok. It might be a rate change, right? You might see an entirely new kind of news culture develop online that is sort of inconceivable to people today.
That's absolutely a possibility. But my guess is, or my observation would be, that what large language models do is they take an enormous corpus of information and data and language, and they produce work that is generative of it.
Well, what would a generative AI trained on audience behavior and news behavior decide audiences want? I think that if you pay close attention to audience behavior, it would decide that what audiences want for the most part is catastrophizing news and negative news and clear enemies and look at the stupid person over here. I think that's what people want.
There's a reason the tabloids historically were close to the checkout line, because when people are ego depleted after making a bunch of decisions in the supermarket and our guard is down, what do we want to read about? We want to read about Hillary Clinton's alien baby. And right now, Hillary Clinton's alien baby, that vibe is permanently and entirely on offer whenever we open up our phones.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Bachelor Happy Hour.
I'm Joe. And I'm Serena.
And we are here with the iHeart Music Awards and David's Bridal. Who are sponsoring this podcast.
And we are so grateful to them. Thank you.
Thank you for finishing my sentence. And we are here with our favorites, Dotton and Charity.
Where were you in Bikinis in the Snow? Montana. Okay.
She flew out and joined you guys. Isn't it cold? No, it was.
Well, yeah, it's Bikinis in the Snow. Of course it's cold.
We risk getting hypothermia for those photos. Wow.
They were sick though. I don't get Bikinis in the Snow.
It's just like an aesthetic. I don't know.
If him and I did that,

if we did like Speedos in the snow,

you guys would be like

douchebags.

Well,

Speedos in the snow

would be hilarious.

I would be like,

let's see it.

Come on.

I would not complain.

I'd beg him to do

stuff like that.

He's like,

no.

That's going to be

the name of this podcast

episode.

Bachelor Happy Hour

Speedos in the snow.

David's Bridal,

if you're listening.

David's Bridal. Shift your branding a little bit.
episode. Bachelor Happy Hour Speedos in the Snow.
David's Bridal, if you're listening. David's Bridal.
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You've had a kind of a point-counterpoint-ish set of podcasts recently with Jonathan Haidt, who has a recent book about the anxiety generation and pointing a lot to phones, but also to some other factors for what's causing increased anxiety. You had David Wallace-Wells, who writes for The Times.
I interviewed about climate change a while back, but you were having him talk about how he is a counter view to this based on data that you were seeing from other countries that maybe this rising levels of anxiety and depression among America's youth might not be about phones, might be about something else. I'm curious which one of those arguments, what were some of the most compelling arguments you heard from both sides of those discussions? It's a huge, big, complicated discussion, but let me try to boil it down to two words.
The debate about smartphones and teen mental health is a debate between people who focus on time and a debate between people who focus on space. So on the time issue, just look at the graphs of rising teenage anxiety.
This is clearly something that takes off in the early 2010s. And it takes off in the US, and it takes off in Western Europe, and then it takes off in UK and also other parts of the rich industrialized world.
What's happening at that time? Well, different things are happening in different places, but clearly smartphone penetration past 50% is happening in all of these places. That's one argument in favor of time.
Another argument in favor of time is that there is really a growing body of evidence that suggests that the more time you spend on a phone, the higher the correlation is with rising anxiety, depression, and negativity. This is all research that's being done on teenagers.
So that's the evidence on time. It's just that it matches up with the time series.
And the more time that people spend on these devices, or teenagers spend on these devices, the more depressed they seem to be really strong correlation. When I say that it's a debate between time and space, what I mean is, the most interesting counter argument to me about the smartphone thesis of John Haidt is, why is this just about happening in English-speaking countries? So if you look at where teen anxiety is spiking, it's spiking in the US and Canada.
It's spiking in Western and Northern Europe, where the share of people that at least speak English is extremely high. It's spiking in New Zealand and Australia.
It's really not happening almost anywhere else. It's not happening in East Asia.
It's not happening in Japan. It doesn't seem to be happening in Africa.
It's absolutely not happening in Eastern Europe, where rates of English speaking are lower. It almost seems like the more...
It's gerunds? It's gerunds that are the problem? What I'm saying is, yeah, it's gerunds. That's it.
It's really bizarre that it's only happening in English-speaking countries unless you think that this is about an interaction effect between smartphones and social media and a particular kind of culture that originated in the English-speaking West when it comes to mental health? What if there's some way that Americans have come to think about depression and anxiety, and maybe even issues like trauma and negativity and catastrophe in the world? What if we are, as the chief cultural exporters of the world, just as successful at exporting our general anxiety disorder as we have been successful as exporting Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola. That's a possibility that I'm very interested in exploring, and I'm currently writing an article about that.
So it could be the case, but we're still in the world of hypotheses here. I was super interested in this conversation.
I think maybe last week it was with David Wells Wells, who I like a lot. The least compelling side of it to me was that there are actual suicides though you could sell me on this notion that the way we're talking about depression and anxiety is in some way exacerbating it it's also helping certain people of course so this it's not a it's not a total bad but you know because there's more awareness and so some people are getting medication that they absolutely needed that they didn't, but that other people, because of just the cultural stew they're in, it's exacerbating a problem that might've been more minor in a different time or culture.
The pushback to that is the actual suicide numbers though, which are up, which is not really about language. That's about action, of course.
Well, the surprising thing about suicide numbers though, is that suicide is really only up in America and a handful of other countries. Suicides are not up in Europe.
In fact, suicide rates from teenagers seem to be falling in Europe. And that, again, I think speaks to the fact that something's happening here that seems to be cultural in addition to being technological.
And I don't think we have to choose. It's not smartphones or America.
It's not smartphones and social media or English-speaking cultures of mental health, negativity, and cognitive behavioral trauma. It could be an interaction effect.
If I had to put my bet on something, I would say there's some really fascinating and complex interaction effect between the damaging effect of smartphones and social media and the fact that americans in the west have in the last few decades arrived at a historically peculiar notion of mental health that might be damaging to some people in particular young people i just just want to circle back to that poll i was referencing earlier because it's interesting and right on our topic today. Blueprint put it out, 943 18 to 30 year olds.
64% say America is in decline. 65% either strongly or somewhat agree that nearly all politicians are corrupt.
Only 7% disagreed. That is insane.
There's a Gallup study on institutional trust that basically asked people if they trust institutions in their countries. I believe it was a study of the G7 countries.
So you got the US in there and France and Germany, Japan. I believe the US is the only country with below 50% trust in its institutions.
I do think we have to keep on the table the possibility that as strange and wishy-washy and namby-pamby as this sounds, there's a culture of negativity in America that is unlike anything that's existed in this country for decades and unlike anything that exists in the rich developed world. And I don't know exactly where it comes from, but it seems like we should be looking for a skeleton key into that because the survey responses that we're getting, and I think we see in our politics and our media really do suggest a kind of very dark american exceptionalism when it comes to this negativity and i'll add to go back to the very first question you asked me the u.s is richer than every country in europe that's more positive at its institutions we've done better since the pandemic than all these countries our inflation rates are lower Our real wage growth is higher.
Our stock prices are higher. If you're a materialist and you believe that material well-being is good for people, and I certainly do, there's a lot to celebrate relative to the experience of Spain, France, Germany.
Look at electricity prices. If Americans had the electricity prices of Germany, I mean, the White House would have been invaded already by roving vans of electricity depressants.
There's a lot that's going well in this country. There's a lot that's not going well in this country.
And for whatever reason, the latter category is getting an order of magnitude more attention. it is crazy to me that's something that I just I'm also just obsessed with this because from the I do a snapchat show where I hear a lot from a lot of teens

and just the negativity is just on, it's like, it's unbelievable. It's like a country where I mentioned all the negatives that have happened in these kids' lives, but there's been huge progress on LGBT issues.
There's been huge awareness of, you know, ways that people have been discriminated against. Certain groups have been discriminated against that are being alleviated, maybe not as fast as we want.
There's a lot of ways where things are progressing and to think that only 7% of people think there are no good politicians, not one, like not their governor, not their congressman, not Barack Obama, not anybody. I mean, that's dark and's dark.
And that is something that is culturally

threatening. Since this is a TDS podcast, can I posit that it's Donald Trump's fault? Or

unfortunately, did all this stuff start in 2013? It's absolutely possible that it's Donald Trump's

fault. I definitely can't disprove that thesis.
So we can we can actually keep that one on the

table too. I mean, electing the stupidest and most racist person among us as the president

has to have some downstream consequences for people's confidence in the American system. It certainly isn't helping people's confidence in the American system, that's for sure.
And this is someone whose political success is entirely tied up with criticizing institutions, the deep state, the fact of democracy. I'll say one thing that might lean us back into optimism because despite the fact that I write about a lot of depressing things, I actually absolutely an optimist to my bones it's really interesting that if you ask people about how the world is going they get more positive as their answers become more local so if you ask americans how is the u.s economy oh it's absolute shit how's your state economy oh it's doing okay how are you oh i'm doing fine i wrote this article maybe a year and a half ago called everything's terrible but i'm fine about this phenomenon where people are consistently personally resilient even as they are consistently globally depressed and that juxtaposition between individual resilience and global depression is fascinating and it might also be a particularly American juxtaposition between individual resilience and global depression is fascinating, and it might also be a particularly American juxtaposition as well.
Okay. I'm also an optimist like you.
I just sometimes it's hard to find. I'm like looking under the covers.
I want to close the loop on the unchurched. You said something that was fascinating to me.
I was on a road trip with a friend of mine. Road trips may be the wrong word, but we had a lengthy drive together.
Also not religious like you, also said the same exact thing, right? Where he's just like, I'm looking around my community and I don't believe in God. It was never a church person.
And I just assess that, like we need to get some people back into the churches because like that's the best idea I've got for just, you know,w of problems that you're seeing in society including you know just obsession over politics cruelty you know the lack of third space so anyway i just wanted to let you kind of close the loop on that challenge where there's anything you learned looking at the research on that well tell me what direction you'd like me to take it i couldn't go as big or as small here. Do you want me to talk about sort of the decline of socializing more broadly, or do you want me to talk about religion specifically? Religion specifically, I think.
One thing I'm interested in, in terms of my own approach to the subject, is that sometimes I feel nostalgic for a feeling I've never experienced. I've never been particularly religious, and yet, in a way, I'm like homesick for a feeling that was never home home for me it's a very strange thing yeah and maybe it has something to do with the fact that as an american you sort of can't extricate yourself from the deep judeo-christian culture that permeates the way that americans think of ourselves and our institutions and each other christmas is church and you know you have you have nostalgia that's wrapped up in you know memories of movies that you liked and childhood trips christmas and easter catholicism or we know whatever it could be all that and i also am very taken with the idea that there's lots of aspects of american culture like our hyper individualism that are essentially an outgrowth ofism.
You know, we think about the world very differently than many people around the world think about reality. There's a great book called The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich, which points out that many biases and mindsets and frameworks that we have to think about what the self is and whether we owe our alliances more to the law or our family, that many of these ideas that seem normal are actually extraordinarily Western and sometimes even uniquely American.
And so I'm interested in that. To scope out and to get to the 30,000 foot level here, what's most interesting to me is the possibility that we are in a century where some of the most important sociological trends all point in the same direction.
And that direction is anti-sociality. We can just start with religion.
Well, every year between the 1930s and 1990s, more than 70% of Americans said they went to church regularly. Last year, it fell below 50% for the first time ever.
You go to work. I work remotely from my basement.
It looks like maybe you're in your home. The rise Remote work, I think, is a really positive phenomenon in a lot of ways.
But it's also a phenomenon that is at least somewhat anti-communal. You know, I'm around fewer people when I work.
And I think that for some people, that's fine. Did you see the study that about like, was it like 40% of people that were working from home said that they go days without leaving their home? I can't bring myself to believe that that's possible, but I suppose it is.
And it also goes to the point that first you're like, how did they eat? Well, once again, I wrote an article when I came back from parental leave about the trends in the restaurant industry. Delivery and takeaway makes up a far larger share of the restaurant industry than it ever has.
Once that's a little bit anti-communal whereas we used to dine together and now we're more likely to dine alone one by one these things aren't so bad but when you put them all together it's interesting they all point in the same direction and the direction really cashes out is this according to the american time use, Americans spend 35% less time face-to-face

socializing than they did in 2003. For teenagers, they spend 50% less time socializing face-to-face.

There's been an extraordinary de-socialization phenomenon in the US in just the last 20 years,

and I wonder how much of the inexplicable phenomena that we're trying to describe

at least touch the phenomena of de-socializing. Well, I'm happy we went out to 30,000

Thank you. how much of the inexplicable phenomena that we're trying to describe at least touch the phenomena of desocializing well i'm happy we went out to 30 000 foot level because you're really you know tickling one of my hobby horses on this right now i think that at an observant level you're the one that's looking at studies um i i'm not but um i think about the people in my life that for whatever reason in the during the pandemic or the post pandemic or you know something you know they got divorced or something happened like the people in my life who have the least social contact with other humans are the ones that feel to me the most unstable the most susceptible to radicalization it's like a natural human thing right if you're alone a lot that's a lot of time to work and start thinking, you know, oh, these people aren't calling me because they hate me.
I think it's very unhealthy. I think it's one of our problems.
And it turned back to a subject that we touched on earlier, which is news media. I also wonder how the antisocial trend touches news media.
So there was an interview that Barack Obama did with Ezra Klein, where he said that he, when he went to rural America. Who's that? Ezra? Ezra Klein? Ezra Klein? Yeah.
I'm not familiar. It must have been on his local town tour, where he was actually talking to Ezra about how, when he ran for president, he went to places like Iowa, and he's visiting these local towns, and talking about how easy it was for him to talk to these crowds, and how much harder it is for him to talk to them now.
And he said, he made this comment where he said, they all get their news from the same sources. It's all Fox News or Sinclair owned television stations or Facebook.
And it's interesting because obviously if you're in the media industry, you're well aware of the fact that local news is in secular decline. I think something like 250 newspapers close roughly every year.
Local newspapers close roughly every year. As local news declines and people become less in touch with their community news, they become more in touch with the news as it exists as a national global phenomenon.
And there might be something berserking about that. This idea that when I read the news, I know more about what's happening in Rafa than I know what's happening down the street.
Because it's more interesting for me to pay attention to debates about Israel Palestine than it is for me to even understand the local laws that affect why my favorite restaurant might have to close down. I think there's something happening there too that also touches this antisocial phenomenon.
Well, I could do a whole podcast on that, so maybe we'll have to have you back in a couple months. But I want to end on two positives.
You do one of my favorite things you do at the end of the year at The Atlantic. As a fellow optimist, you write about the breakthroughs of the year.
I glanced at this year's before we got on, and I picked out four. And I just want you to pick your favorite to tell us about.
CRISPRs, malaria and RSV vaccines, Fervo and hydrogen, engineered skin bacteria. The other ones I already knew about.
So those are the four that I don't know a lot about. I want you to get me excited about something.
Man, they're all incredibly exciting. Do them all in one sentence or do one and do one long.
It's your call. Let's talk about engineering skin bacteria.
I think this is one of the coolest, most surprising things that I read in anything last year. To catch people up, every year I ask a bunch of my favorite scientists, what's the coolest thing that happened in science technology in the last 12 months? And I get all the responses and I rank my 10 favorite responses.
And this was certainly the weirdest response that I got, that there is a technology for engineering skin cells to attack diseases. And the way that you essentially apply the therapy would be to essentially paint a person's, I mean, in this case, it was a rat, but paint a rat's nose to deliver a drug that travels through the skin into the bloodstream.
And one reason I find this story really interesting is that, you know, we think about taking a drug really in like one or two ways, right? It's either a pill, or's an injection. Like that's it.
Every drug is a pill or an injection. You know, maybe kind of think a little bit bigger, darling, right? Like, let's talk about like painting our face, but putting a little patch in our skin, putting a little bit of like a, of a cream on our cheek that would have the same molecular properties as the pill that we're taking or the chemotherapy or the IV that is dripping.
That's really powerful when you think about the fact that a lot of anxiety about vaccines, I think, isn't just an anxiety about the goo in the vaccines. It's an anxiety about the needle.
And if we could make vaccines a spray in our nose, if we could make it a paint on our skin that might increase uptake of life-saving medicines significantly that's interesting well all the other ones were interesting people can go read it in december if you're an atlantic subscriber jeff goldberg really should be giving me a cut of atlantic subscriptions at this point i keep telling people to go subscribe to the atlantic all right lastly because The Ringer, The Ringer, like me, shares an obsession with the NBA. I'm still licking my wounds as listeners know about the Nuggets, but I thought that in the spirit of your nine breakthroughs of the year, we could just spend a moment together on the brilliance of Victor Wembenyama.
I just don't think people understand what is about to happen with this guy. In some ways, he might have ruined the Nuggets year because we randomly lost to lost to the spurs who are terrible with two games left in the season to move us from the first seed to the second seed but um even still i'm not bitter at him i've got to go see him twice this year he's like a gazelle he's like seven i think he lies to make himself shorter he's like seven foot five or six you can shoot threes and do crossovers and touch the rim without jumping.
The direction of where we're going with these kinds of athletes now in a globalized game, and does it just fill you with the joy and wonder of a child that it does for me? It's amazing. And it's fun to think about it historically, too.
I did a fun podcast with Kirk Goldsberry about his new book, Hoop Atlas. And one of the things we talked about is this really interesting history of MVPs.
So just about all the MVPs, the 1960s, 1970s, went to centers. And then for a long time, no center, essentially, won MVP, maybe except for Shaq.
In the 80s, 90s, 2000s, you have MVPs dominated by Magic and Bird and Jordan. And there was a little bit of Akeem there, and there's a little bit of Shaq here and there, but basically you had wings and shooters taking over the league.
And especially in the era where the Warriors were dominant, it seemed like the future of the center position was going to look like Draymond Green. That is to say, 6'6", 6'7", and strong as an ox.
But what ended up happening is all the skills developed by wings and guards ended up being bundled up in these big guys coming from Europe, and I suppose Africa as well. And so you have Embiid who can shoot threes, and you have Jokic who's the best passer in the league, and you have Wemby who's probably in the next five years going to average something unbelievably stupid, like a 30, 15,

eight, seven, and five or something. And that's just going to be normal.
That's just going to be the norm. And I think that we're just entering the age.
We went from the age of the center to the age of the do-it-all shooter. And now we are in the synthesis.
We are in the age of the do-it-all center. And it really would not be crazy if centers won every MVP of the 2020s.
I mean, they've won the last five, essentially, to count Giannis as a center. It wouldn't be crazy if centers and de facto centers won 10, 15 MVPs in a row.
it's unbelievable even for folks who aren't like well into basketball the wimby youtube clips i

mean it's almost like if you're into sci-fi it's almost interesting to be watching when i first saw

the european It's unbelievable. Even for folks who aren't into basketball, the Wemba YouTube clips, it's almost like if you're into sci-fi, it's almost interesting to be watching.
When I first saw the European clips of him, he would come from off screen. I was like, oh my God, who is the velociraptor? that shot when he when he misses the three and then catches the rebound in the air and in one

motion dunks it i was like this is this is a video game. Like God cheated.
And now we just have to live in the aftermath of God cheating. It is phenomenal.
Derek Thompson, his podcast is Plain English. He writes for The Atlantic.
Please come back to the podcast soon. Give us a little dose of optimism and hope to see you around the bend.
This is fun. Thanks.
All right. Thanks, everybody.
We'll be back.

I'm not sure when we're going to be back.

We pre-tape this one because we don't know when the Trump trial is coming.

So we'll see you on the next podcast because I do this every day.

Peace. I really wanna go outside and start to see you today You, you really wanna hold up You really wanna stay inside and sleep the light away I, I, I really wanna go out I really wanna go outside And be in line all day You, you really wanna hold up You really wanna stay inside And lake where you're late

But I know what's good

Exactly cause I haven't been there before

Yeah, I know what's whole

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