Inside the Anti-Social Century — with Derek Thompson

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**SPEAKER_3** (0:45)
Introducing Meta Glasses.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:48)
You have questions, they've got answers.

**Scott Galloway** (0:51)
Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:53)
Lima. How do you say, where's the restroom in Spanish?

**SPEAKER_5** (0:58)
Dónde está el baño?

**Derek Thompson** (0:59)
Hey Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:03)
Technically no. Spiritually, yes.

**Scott Galloway** (1:05)
Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:08)
That's one of life's biggest questions. What do you think?

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**Scott Galloway** (1:16)
Episode 406, the area code for the state of Montana in 2006, Twitter launched and Google acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion. What did the YouTuber say when he reached Nirvana? I'm content.
I like that.

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Go, go, go.

**Scott Galloway** (1:45)
Welcome to the 406th episode of The Prof G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we're sharing our live conversation with Derek Thompson, a Prof G favorite, and Derek is a Substack writer, co-author of Abundance, and a host of the podcast, Plain English, wrote for The Atlantic for a long time, or I think still does. But he's such an impressive young man and such an interesting thinker, and I love the way he writes. He's, anyways, I'm a huge fan of Derek's. If you don't want to miss our next live stream or other content exclusive to Substack, you can subscribe at profgmedia.com. That's profgmedia.com. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Derek Thompson.
Good morning and welcome to our live Substack here. We're excited to be joined by a friend of the pod and one of our sharpest or one of the sharpest voices in media politics. That's Derek Thompson. I don't want to say we discovered Derek, 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. Is that right?

**Derek Thompson** (3:03)
That's right. I did a podcast with The Atlantic probably 10 years ago. It was called Crazy Genius, and we had a conversation about the tech giants based around-

**Scott Galloway** (3:14)
Yeah. Was it your first book before?

**Derek Thompson** (3:16)
Yeah. And so we talked about Amazon and Google, and you had anatomical representations of each company, right? There was the head and the heart.

**Scott Galloway** (3:25)
Yeah, the gut and the genitals, yeah. 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.

**Derek Thompson** (3:35)
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 the 1990s or something. But yeah, Crazy Genius was really fun, and that was a pure tech show.
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. I remember talking to my producer when we had you on, she was like, that guy is awesome. He could have a potential in this medium.

**Scott Galloway** (4:03)
You never know. So yeah. Better be lucky than good. It was either that, I had a show on CNN Plus which got canceled, so I just leaned into podcasting.
So you never know. Failure sometimes opens a door. So the way we're going to do it here, folks, is I'm going to talk to Derek about this fantastic kind of term I like, and that is that we've entered the Anti-Social Century, which puts 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 Anti-Social 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.