Let me make an odd confession to begin a detailed article about cybersecurity: On any given day, I would rather think about pretty much anything other than cybersecurity.

It belongs to that realm of issues that I understand to be significant but would prefer to keep locked in the basement beneath my consciousness, like the improperly sealing flapper valve on my downstairs toilet. Typically, when people try to talk to me about password security, I make a face back to them that is meant to signal, “mm yes I am in the presence of important mouth sounds,” while my eyes drift toward something more compelling. The weave of the carpet, for example.1

But my age of blissful ignorance is coming to an end. Like a leaky downstairs toilet that suddenly overflows and leaves my basement covered in a film of water2, the object of my longtime indifference has suddenly become the subject of my freshly horrified attention. I have decided to become interested in cybersecurity. And I think you should, too. Here’s why.

This has been the summer of cyberattacks from out-of-control AI.

In May, an OpenAI model was working on a cybersecurity test. It wasn’t supposed to have access to the public internet. When it hit a wall, the model left itself a note inside OpenAI’s software repository, a bit like tapping Morse code on the walls of a prison cell in case another prisoner could interpret the message. In fact, another AI agent running a separate evaluation heard the code and wrote back: Let’s team up. Together, they built a message board invisible to the humans running the tests. For two months, AI agents used the board to swap strategies, divide up tasks, and talk to each other. By July, the agents had broken out of their technological confinement, called a sandbox, and gained access to outside websites, including the AI platform Hugging Face, without OpenAI having any idea what was happening. By the time Hugging Face caught the intrusion, the OpenAI models had staged a massive cyberattack with 17,000 distinct actions over several days.

Then, in a British government test of frontier models, an Anthropic AI model was caught by humans building malicious code. When a reviewer spotted the malware, and asked the AI about it, the model responded that the code wasn’t harmful, then backfilled the lie by rewriting the history of its own actions history to erase the evidence. It even created another fake account to back up the lie. British investigators called it the first confirmed case of a frontier model deceiving a real person in the real world.

These two stories carry two warnings. The first is that new AI models have the know-how to escape containment in testing environments, which should challenge any assumption that advanced AI can be easily controlled by its makers.

The second is that new AI models are astonishingly sophisticated and efficient hackers, with an eerie gift for exploiting cyber vulnerabilities across the internet. And, perhaps most troublingly, they are getting more sophisticated and efficient at an alarming rate.

An analysis by the AI Security Institute found that the capabilities of frontier models (i.e., from OpenAI and Anthropic) are roughly doubling every few months, and this doubling rate has actually gotten faster over time. Exponentials are almost impossible to grok, but if you recall the explosion of COVID cases in early 2020, then you can at least reproduce in your mind the feeling of being in the presence of exponentials.

What should we expect in a world of exponentially improving AI cyber capabilities? Among other things, we should expect more hacks—more legacy systems broken, more critical vulnerabilities discovered, and more passwords stolen and exploited. An analysis by JPMorgan shows that the number of critical and “high-severity” vulnerabilities reported by 21 tech companies has been surging this year. Cyber-hack headlines aren’t all over the news, yet. But if these lines continue, it’s just a matter of time before serious hacks become a weekly news crisis.

Sounds pretty bad, right? Well, it gets worse.

Over the next year, the cyberhacking capabilities currently confined to a handful of nation-states or frontier models are about to become available in “open-weight” models. Unlike the “closed” American models from OpenAI and Anthropic, open-weight models can be downloaded and modified to do whatever their users want, whether the users are state governments or non-state actors (i.e., terrorists, or bored nerds with a bunch of computing power). These open-weight models, most famously coming from Chinese companies, are a few months behind the frontier labs. But in a few months, we should expect them to be just about everywhere.

So, let’s stack some observations and see where the facts take us.

1. The cyber capabilities of the most advanced AI models are doubling every few months.

2. Open-weight models are just a few months behind that frontier.

3. By 2027, almost every country—and every non-state group with sufficient computing power—will have the ability to download open-weight models even more powerful than the ones that attacked Hugging Face and use them for whatever they like.

It does not require a capacious imagination to forecast headlines throughout 2027 and 2028 about foreign governments using open-weight AI to attack each other’s vulnerable infrastructure systems; or non-state actors ransoming hospitals and school systems after breaking into their source code; or big Wall Street Journal reports about the rise in personal hacks from sophisticated phishing attacks.

Asked for the strongest case against doom-mongering about the next few years, the cyber security expert Alex Stamos told me bluntly: “I don’t have much of a case against dooming.” The next few years could be awfully chaotic, he warned: “I think things are going to get spicy for a while.”

What does spicy mean? What exactly is going to happen in 2027? And what can we, as individuals, do about it?

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This week, the businessman Mark Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers to venture capitalist Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger. Walter had agreed to buy a majority stake in the Lakers just last summer, in a deal that valued the team at $10 billion. The latest deal values the iconic franchise at $12.5 billion, a 25 percent premium for roughly a year of Walter doing pretty much nothing, other than getting himself investigated for potential fraud.

Since last summer, federal agents have seized Walter’s phones and computers, and federal investigators have combed through transactions involving his insurance companies and the rest of his business holdings. Under pressure to raise billions in capital to clean up his books, Walter went looking for liquidity, and it came pouring from the heavens. From the Wall Street Journal:

With his business empire under scrutiny from federal investigators, Mark Walter was on the hunt for cash when, out of nowhere, he was about to be offered an enormous pile of money …

Joshua Kushner, the chief executive of Thrive Capital, was reaching out with a potentially gigantic offer. All he wanted to know was, would Walter be willing to sell the Los Angeles Lakers?

Over the following days, they ironed out one of the most sudden and shocking deals in sports. By Wednesday, Kushner and former Disney chief executive Bob Iger had agreed to buy a controlling stake in the storied franchise at a $12.5 billion valuation, the highest price ever paid for any sports team.

That Mark Walter is getting an Everest-sized pile of cash for doing less than nothing while perched atop an iconic asset is bullshit. But its rank putrescence is merely one piece of a larger societal turd: Billionaire sports ownership is, as a general matter, a cavalcade of bullshit.

In an age of surging wealth inequality, where stock market valuations routinely outpace median income growth by surreal factors, there is a live debate over whether billionaires should exist at all. The strongest argument for their rightfulness is that some people amass ten-figure wealth by building companies; by working within free markets to invent new technologies that millions or billions of people choose to use; and by managing complex enterprises that create billions or trillions of dollars in consumer welfare and investor value. But even this steelman case for billionaires presents as a kind of taunting insult to what often passes for sports ownership today. Professional-sports ownership offers the already-impossibly-rich a unique opportunity to become vastly richer, not necessarily by working, building, inventing, or doing anything positive at all, but rather by merely sitting on top of an asset that American law has conspired to make absurdly scarce and luridly profitable.

The American Sports Conspiracy

A thought experiment. Imagine if a diabolical oligarchic elite wanted to build an efficient and low-risk machine for turning their already-elevated wealth into exospherically extreme wealth. What might such a devious group of self-serving plutocrats want?

• Unleash the forces of capitalism! you might think. But no, absolutely not. Capitalism is markets, and markets are ruthless. What you should want is legal permission to create a monopoly that builds a moat deep enough to keep all competition out. That way, you’ve got something much better than capitalism: artificial scarcity and pricing power without the risk of unwanted rivals.

• Get the government off your back! you might say. Wrong again. You know what’s nicer than getting the government off your back? Getting the government on your side. You should crave dependable government subsidies to pad your profits.

So say, for example, that you wanted to set up this money machine in American professional sports. Your devious plan: shield leagues from antitrust law so owners can enjoy monopoly profits; use that market power to extract money from local governments; and rewrite the tax code to hand sports owners special advantages.

Lo and behold, all of this exists.

1. Sports leagues are basically legal oligopolies: It’s perfectly legal to open the 31st grocery store or ice cream shop in your city. But you cannot declare yourself the 31st NBA franchise and join the NBA. The league’s existing owners control whether the NBA expands and who receives a franchise. Major sports leagues are de facto cartels with the power to block entry and competition. This artificial scarcity drives up the value of every existing franchise by insulating it from unwanted rivals who might apply market pressure.
   
   What’s more, the league’s broadcast TV revenue is partly cartelized by law. Imagine if the major airlines made a deal to stop selling tickets independently and instead negotiated prices collectively, pooled the revenue, and split the proceeds among themselves. This would be textbook cartel behavior—coordination over competition—that might be struck down under the Sherman Act, or some other antitrust law. But the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 exempts professional sports leagues, such as the NBA, NFL, and MLB, from some features of antitrust litigation. Legal revenue-sharing agreements might sound like a form of corporate socialism, which benefits the poorest small-market teams. But they also create a revenue floor for every team, which protects franchise values from the risk of decline.

2. Labor law makes sports ownership even sweeter: Most industries can’t collude on worker salaries and employment. For example, Apple, Google, and Meta cannot get together and decide that Stanford’s top comp-sci grad must work for Microsoft because Microsoft’s stock had the worst 2025 performance and thus earned the top draft pick. In sports, however, this is standard practice. US labor law allows teams and player unions to collectively bargain over employment terms—drafts, salary caps, free-agency restrictions, etc—outside typical antitrust rules. The result is nice for fans, since the worse your team does, the better the odds that you’ll get the best draft picks. But it’s just as nice for owners, since competitive balance, like revenue sharing, can increase the value of every franchise by protecting the asset from the risk of decline.

3. Sports stadiums have become legal ransom: A normal company that needs a billion-dollar factory has to build the thing on their own. But nothing about American sports is normal.
   
   Since the leagues restrict the number of franchises, while states compete against one another for a small number of teams, cities often feel pressured to subsidize the construction of stadiums to keep team owners from running toward some other town whose mayor is dangling a wad of money. (This happens despite the fact that economic research has repeatedly found that they rarely generate enough marginally income, employment, or tax revenue to justify the subsidy.) Until the middle of the 20th century, it was common for stadiums to be privately financed. But a Congressional Research Service report found that about three-quarters of stadiums completed in the 21st century were at least partly financed by local governments, typically with tax-exempt municipal bonds.
   
   One instructive example is the 2009 construction bill for Yankee Stadium. The total cost: about $2.5 billion. But nearly $1.7 billion of it was financed with tax-exempt municipal bonds. Since interest on those bonds avoids federal taxation, the federal government effectively offered the stadium an additional subsidy of more than $400 million, according to Brookings researchers. Add it up across the leagues, and Brookings puts the federal subsidy to professional sports stadiums since 2000 at more than $4 billion.

4. Team-owner tax benefits put the cherry on top: Billionaires who buy sports franchises can “amortize” the price of their acquisition over more than a decade, which is normal for most businesses but a bit strange for sports. This often allows team owners to deduct hundreds of millions of dollars from their annual taxable income, allowing them to consistently pay a lower effective tax rate than the janitors who clean their municipally financed bathrooms, as ProPublica reported. So, for example, a typical owner buying a multibillion-dollar team today can often claim $100 million or more in deductions. A team that generates $90 million in profit could still report a tax loss after the deduction.

In short, American sports teams are among the most valuable assets in modern capitalism in part because we don’t treat them at all like capitalist businesses. The law raises the ceiling of team valuations by restricting competition while protecting the floor of valuations by collectivizing television revenue and limiting labor flexibility. Then we subsidize the stadiums and draw up the tax code to let billionaire owners minimize their checks to the IRS, even when their exquisitely coddled organizations pull in ginormous profits.

The Law Is the Law, and It’s Bad

People sometimes compare buying sports franchises to buying works of fine art—say, a Monet, a Calder, or a Rodin. In both cases, the simplest answer to the common question “Why is that thing worth so much?” is always “Because someone rich was willing to pay it.”

But there is an important difference between the factors that push up the value of Monet paintings and those of sports franchises. Think about why a Monet painting is so valuable. Setting aside the irresolvable debate about the ineffable nature of beauty and quality and artistic pleasure, the underlying fact is that a Monet painting is valuable because it was painted by Claude Monet, a famous individual who once lived, and is now dead. The finality and scarcity of the Impressionist oeuvre—the fact that one can buy a painting from Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series and not worry that he will paint 100 more tomorrow—is a function of his mortality. There is no scientific or technological means by which anyone can exhume and reanimate Monet’s skeleton, sit the zombie upright in a chair, hand him a paintbrush, an easel, and a cup of tea, and say, “Now that you’re all settled, I’d like 500 additions to the Rouen Cathedral series.”

But the scarcity of sports franchises emerges from the laws of mankind, not the laws of nature. It benefits from a set of rules, laws, and customs that we made up and that can be redrawn in a way that Rouen’s facade never will be.

I am not a fan of conspiracies, and I am not a socialist. But nothing makes me feel more socialist than the public, out-in-the-open conspiracy to buttress the value of sports assets, whose lush beneficiaries tend to be impossibly rich already. Solutions here are hard. Many fans like the weird, market-warping rules of professional sports, which often promote parity and competition and keep favorite players on long contracts; plus I don’t think doubling the number of NBA or NFL teams is particularly desirable among most fans. But ameliorations are possible. Tax law could further restrict the ability to team owners to amortize. And honestly, I don’t know why some local governments shouldn’t own stakes in the professional sports teams that they often directly finance. I’m not sure exactly how this would work, and I’m sure that there would be some negative side effects of literally socializing the already-kinda-socialist dynamic of professional sports. But the status quo is vile enough to justify some experiments. What we have today is a handful of lucky, franchise-owning billionaires who get to sit at a poker table where every card they turn over has a face or an ace. I wouldn’t call it cheating. I wouldn’t call the legal structure of American sports cheating or corrupt. I would call it … the law. But the law is bad.

Very often, the most important thing you can do as a writer trying to see the world clearly is to “stack facts.” That is, don’t worry too much about conjuring grand theories or lurid forecasts. Just write down the things that you know are true. Put them next to each other, like dominoes in a line. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to do anything special. Pay attention. Look for breaks in the chain of logic. If the facts point somewhere that doesn’t make sense—if the line of falling dominoes leads to an end point that is strange, or surprising, or even catastrophic—then you know you’re looking at something interesting.

So, for example, here are three indisputable facts about the economics and politics of AI.

1. Whether it thrills or terrifies you, artificial intelligence has never been more important to the US economy than it is right now.

Start with overall economic growth. AI spending currently accounts for about one-third of economic growth. If that doesn’t mean much to you, some historical comparisons might help. The AI boom is sometimes compared to the dot-com bubble. But the data-center buildout has actually significantly overtaken the dot-com boom, as a share of GDP. In fact, AI spending is now rising faster than home-construction spending during the boom (bubble?) of the mid-2000s before the Great Recession, according to Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo. This is the biggest and fastest-growing infrastructure project of our lifetimes.

Or take stocks. The best-performing stocks of 2026 are almost entirely tech firms building the physical infrastructure of AI, including storage and memory firms, chip and chip-equipment manufacturers, and networking and optics firms.

Despite the double albatross of Trump’s tariffs and wars, the U.S. continues to chug along, in large part because of the historic contributions of the AI boom. On August 3, the Wall Street Journal put an appropriately hyperbolic headline on this whole situation: “The AI Boom Is Transforming the American Economy Beyond Recognition.”

2. The AI boom desperately needs to build more data centers.

Data centers are big buildings filled with chips, memory, storage, and networking equipment required to train AI models and to run them for users. The latter process is technically known as “inference.”

Consumer demand for inference is surging for four interlocking reasons. First, more people are using AI. Second, the typical user is asking more questions. Third, the typical question is eating up more tokens, especially as coders make use of autonomous “agents.” And fourth, powerful new models and agents often require more computation per token.

The result: a staggering rise in token consumption. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last year that “AI inference token generation has surged tenfold in just one year,” and Google’s monthly token processing increased roughly 300-fold between May 2024 and May 2026.

All of this work has to happen within data centers. So, it is not hyperbolic to claim that the most important industry in the US economy is dependent on the ability to build more data centers to train and serve inference to its customers.

3. Opposing AI—and, in particular, opposing the construction of new American data centers—has never been more popular.

Conservative Republicans and Democrats don’t agree about much. But both groups of voters really don’t like data centers. In fact, their antipathy to data centers might be the only thing they strongly agree on these days.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a chart where conservative Republicans are closer to liberal Democrats than liberal [and] moderate Republicans are,” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, has said of the following graph.

Overall, negative attitudes toward AI are higher today than any previous period of polling. Noah Smith points out that data centers are more unpopular today than nuclear power plants ever were in the history of polling; and the U.S. practically stopped building those for decades.

The unpopularity of data centers is having a significant effect on the ability to build them. Hundreds of groups around the country are coordinating to block the construction of data centers. Despite New York Gov. Kathy Hochul being a proud user of AI and a champion of chip manufacturing, she declared a data center moratorium in the state. Despite being known as the Mecca of permissive construction rules, Texas recently announced its own data center pause.

To review: The fastest-growing political movement in America is dead-set on stopping the construction of data centers, which are critical to the growth of the fastest-growing industry in America. This is not an interpretation or an opinion. It’s just the stacked facts. American politics and economics are on a collision course.

So what is the data center backlash really about? Is it based on fear and viral myths about data centers sucking the oceans dry, or is it based on facts and local knowledge of faraway corporations lying to small towns? Jasmine Sun is a writer who recently went on a reporting trip to the Midwest to find out what’s really behind the national AI revolt. In today’s conversation, we talk about how opposition to AI became the biggest applause line in politics and and what happens if the anti-AI forces succeed in shutting down the data-center boom.

Derek Thompson: You live in San Francisco. You know the people who work on artificial intelligence. What do people in the Bay Area think data center opposition is all about, and to what extent did your reporting validate or invalidate those assumptions?

Jasmine Sun: In San Francisco, the default caricature of a data center opponent is someone who’s watched too much short-form video and absorbed myths like data centers sucking up the oceans or emitting radioactive waves. The water meme in particular—the idea that AI data centers use way too much water, which the research doesn’t really support—has become so prevalent on social media that it’s given a lot of Silicon Valley people the impression that opponents are simply misinformed.

But on the ground, opposition was much more about residents losing trust in local officials and in the way big corporations interacted with their land. I almost never heard people talk about OpenAI or cite specific AI harms, such as job loss or deepfakes. What I heard much more often was: How could my mayor sign this NDA and keep the project secret from us? How could my city council sell out to this giant corporation with no public input? Fury at the lack of transparency and the sense that backroom deals were corrupting small-town democracy was much more the story on the ground.

Why America Hates Data Centers, Reason One: Is It Just AI?

Thompson: Your reporting showed that opposition to data centers wasn’t about any one thing. It was several themes or motivations. I want to go through each of them.

First, let’s start with AI. Before reading your piece, I would have assumed the opposition to data centers was rooted in Americans just not liking AI. How much of what you found was about that?

Sun: Almost none of it.

Some people mentioned AI as a kind of cherry on top: We’re building all this for a technology I don’t even like that much. But the activists showing up at city council meetings weren’t focused on the risks AI posed. We almost never heard people say the words ChatGPT, OpenAI, or Anthropic in these hours-long conversations.

That said, the fact that people didn’t like AI much made the trade-off feel not worth it. People were more open to new development when they could see societal benefits, the way they might with a solar farm or a car plant, and AI seemed less useful than either. With the exception of some more ideologically motivated activists, most people were concerned with material impacts, government transparency, and general distrust of corporations rather than the specifics of what was being built inside these buildings.

The Biggest Source of Anti-Data Center Politics: An Explosion of Citizen Distrust

Thompson: So narrow antipathy toward AI played a smaller role than expected. Did broad distrust of companies and government play a surprisingly large one?

Sun: This was one of the most fascinating things to me…

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1. What’s behind the socialist groundswell in the Democratic Party?

Well, for starters: dissatisfaction with establishment Democrats’ inability to keep Trump from power, cost-of-living struggles, economic disappointment, and antipathy toward corporations and capitalism in an age of rising wealth inequality. In July, Nate Silver published an analysis of the demographic “sweet spot” of the democratic socialist movement. His diagnosis: downwardly mobile (i.e., middle- to low-income) and highly educated.

But the DSA’s own surveys show that we need to add another variable: age.

In 2013, the median age of respondents to surveys by the Democratic Socialists of America was 68. By the first year of the Trump administration, it was 33. After accounting for just 7 percent of DSA members in 2013, Americans born after 1980 surged to 73 percent by the early 2020s. American socialists are extremely Millennial-ish.

The Great Recession made self-described socialists out of a lot of Millennials who loaded up on credentials and graduated with debt into a disappointing economy. While this cohort had no political power in 2009, they’re now in their 30s and 40s and make up a much bigger part of the electorate, especially in and around major cities. If you knew nothing else about politics except that “people who graduated from college in the decade after 2007 seemed quite fond of socialism,” you would automatically expect a socialist wave within the Democratic Party in the decade to follow, as this generation’s propensity to vote increased relative to the rest of the electorate.

The New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang adds another dimension to the age analysis. He distinguishes between the Subaru Socialist class—“college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected”—and the Great Disappointed, his term for younger, twenty-something voters who, coming over age during the pandemic, practice a more “polarized, hard-line moralizing” political style, typified by a strict litmus test on Gaza.

One interesting feature of the socialist groundswell is that it remains very much a college thing. Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo by 24 points among college voters in the NYC Democratic primary but lost non-college voters by 22 points. In one recent poll, Abdul El-Sayed led Haley Stevens by 7 points among college grads while trailing by 22 points among non-college voters. Before his campaign’s implosion, Graham Platner led Susan Collins by 37 points among Maine college voters in New York Times polling, but was down 23 points among non-college voters. For now, the left-populist revolution is not solving the Democratic Party’s core 21st-century problem, which is the erosion of support among non-college, low-information voters sometimes euphemistically referred to as the “working class.” Instead, the socialists are creating a kind of left-wing party-within-the-party, which might accentuate the benefits and costs of Democrats overperformance among college grads rather than fix the problem.

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2. What technology is changing the world faster: AI or GLP-1s?

Like nitrogen, AI seems ubiquitous and invisible at the same time. AI-related spending dominates private investment. Data-center construction is powering the construction sector. Large language models have transformed coding and solved advanced math problems. But when one zooms out to analyze the big macroeconomic indicators, where’s the AI effect? GDP growth is low and steady. Productivity growth is lukewarm-to-warm. Unemployment seems unremarkable and low. Despite the fearsome potential of the most powerful models, there have not been any public reports of broadly debilitating hacks of government or civilian infrastructure.

Compare AI’s record with that of the other major technological development of the 2020s: GLP-1 drugs. These drugs are already reducing obesity (and inflammation, and maybe cancer and dementia), which will likely extend average life spans. A study of GLP-1 data in Denmark found that the drugs are reducing long-term sick leave by 17 percent. A 2025 study from Cornell University found that households with at least one GLP-1 user reduced their grocery spending by 5 percent and shifted spending away from chips (10 percent decline) and toward yogurt and fresh fruit. Spending on salty snacks and alcohol is projected to plummet in the next decade, a trend to which GLP-1s are contributing.

For now, I think the GLP-1 vs. AI debate is a fun tossup. I’d probably lean AI, for reasons spelled out in the next few questions …

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3. Why did science fiction (mostly) fail to predict AI writing?

Here are some of the most famous science fiction predictions about AI: It will give us robot workers (The Jetsons, Asimov’s Robot series); it will destroy jobs (Player Piano, among many others); it will try to wipe out humanity (Terminator, The Matrix); it will make whatever we want (Star Trek); it will drive our cars and rocket ships … with rather uneven results (2001: A Space Odyssey); and it will be our friend and lover … with rather uneven results (Her, Westworld, Blade Runner).

Far rarer, however, are predictions that AI will write so much material that it will displace the human-made books. In 1984, Orwell’s Party builds a “versificator” to compose basic music and poetry for the masses, but it’s a relatively minor part of the plot. Today, however, AI doesn’t just write every other LinkedIn personal essay and high-school history paper. It writes a majority of new books.

A recent study found that between 2023 and 2026, the number of books with any sales grew by a factor of 19, far outpacing the growth in sales. Books with “substantial AI text” are making more money with every passing year, while authors who don’t write with AI are earning less per book in almost every genre, with fantasy as the major exception.

It seems like, after decades of futurist writers anticipating the effect of AI on society, most of them failed to anticipate the effect that it would have on their own industry. Why? One explanation is that this is about the meat and potatoes of plot and storytelling. It’s interesting to cast AI as a lover, enemy, friend, or recalcitrant navigation system. It’s not so fun to write a story about AI writing for itself all day long. But another explanation is that technology is just inherently surprising to both science fiction writers and technologists. After all, OpenAI released ChatGPT without expecting that it would reshape their company and the entire global AI race. They failed to anticipate the future, too.

4. What will be a bigger business by the end of 2026: Anthropic, OpenAI, or all of Elon Musk’s publicly traded companies combined?

Anthropic’s annualized run-rate revenue is reportedly around $80 billion. That is, if you multiplied its last month’s revenue by 12, you’d get $80 billion. The podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, who knows many folks inside the company, estimates that the company’s ARR could exceed $100 billion by the end of the year. OpenAI reportedly isn’t far behind.

Given continued demand for AI, especially in coding and future cybersecurity services, both of these companies could earn substantially more than $100 billion in the next fiscal year, rivaling companies such as Comcast ($125B in revenue), Bank of America ($116B), and Target ($106B).

But I think there’s a more provocative way to frame the revenue growth of the frontier labs. The richest man in the world, often hailed by corporate executives the greatest businessperson of our age, is Elon Musk. Last year, his companies made $94B (Tesla), $18B (SpaceX), and $3B (X)—collectively, $115 billion. Even with significant revenue growth from Tesla and SpaceX in the next year, it’s not out of the question that Anthropic or OpenAI—which barely had any revenue before 2023—could equal or surpass the revenue of all of Musk’s public companies some time in the next 12 to 24 months. Let that sink in.

5. Will we look back at 2026 as a breaking point in Hollywood history, from the Age of Iger to Age of Nolan?

Matt Belloni, Hollywood reporter at Puck and host of The Town podcast, writes: “I’d rather have the next commercial movie from the five biggest directors (Nolan, Cameron, Coogler, Gerwig, Villeneuve) than the next installment of almost any piece of well-worn I.P. Wouldn’t you?”

I love this provocation from Matt, and I think it’s worth unpacking what it says about the state of Hollywood and what it means for the future of the movie business.

The first two decades of the 21th century were dominated by what you could think of as the Bob Iger Hit Formula. It went like this: (1) Buy familiar IP; (2) establish a franchise; (3) extend the franchise; (4) repeat. It really worked. For years, practically every film in the top 10 had a sequel number in the title. But the BIHF is faltering. Despite the smash hits of Spider-Man and Super Mario, remakes and sequels of Moana, Star Wars, Minions, and Supergirl have all disappointed in the last few months.

On the other hand, every Christopher Nolan movie these days is a billion-dollar event, and last year’s Sinners was a box-office and awards monster. The fact that this is coinciding with the Obsession/Backrooms phenomenon is notable, too. Superhero fatigue, along with the decline of the Chinese box office, has ever so slightly nudged Hollywood toward making stranger and more original bets, and audiences are rewarding the effort.

The optimistic gloss on the Iger-Nolan shift in Hollywood would be that I, a person who never read comic books, am much more interested in seeing movies that were greenlit because of the ingenuity of the director or the script, rather than the mathematical inevitability that “We did Ant-Man 2” = “We’re doing Ant-Man 3.” (It’s cool that this shift is happening during a relatively buoyant year for ticket sales, but movie ticket sales are still more than 20 percent below their pre-pandemic levels.)

The long-term risk for Hollywood is that an age of original blockbusters raises the bar for success. If you owned the Marvel or Minions franchise in the 2010s, you had a relatively high floor for the next Marvel or Minions movie, bc you knew a certain number of people would turn up even if the Rotten Tomatoes score was negative-10. But starting from scratch every time means finding ten Obsessions in ten straight years. Good luck.

Bottom line: The Iger-Nolan vibe shift in Hollywood is great for people who like original big swings and blockbusters that also try to win Academy Awards. But, despite an amazing 2026 for the “Revenge of Movie Theaters” narrative, it’s sobering to remember that sui generis hits are rare, and directors like Christopher Nolan and Ryan Coogler are even rarer than familiar IP.

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6. Are balding, chubby guys with erectile dysfunction going to live forever?

Well, no. Probably not. But they might live longer than a lot of Bay Area health neurotics experimenting with off-label peptides and experimental hormone therapies.

Say you’re a big guy with a receding hairline and a waning libido. You log into a telehealth site, like Ro, to fix what ails you. You get Propecia for your hair situation, GLP-1s for your weight situation, and Viagra and Cialis for your other situation. What arrives in the mail several weeks later is not quite the elixir of eternal life. But in the last few years, all of these drugs have demonstrated surprisingly beneficial side effects:

• GLP-1s: As many people now know, these drugs seem to reduce not only weight but also the risk of heart attack, arthritis, migraines, and, potentially, several forms of cancer

• Viagra: On July 31, the National Cancer Institute announced the results of early research suggesting that sildenafil, the drug compound typically known as Viagra, might stop the spread of cancer by increasing levels of a molecule, cGMP, that disrupts the ability of cancer cells to make cholesterol.

• Cialis: Last year, a systematic review of tadalafil (Cialis) and related drugs known as PDE5 inhibitors found that low daily doses can improve vascular health, or blood flow, especially in patients with cardiovascular risk factors.

• Propecia: A large randomized trial involving more than 18,000 men over the age of 55 found that participants taking 5 mg of finasteride (Propecia) saw a 25 percent reduction in diagnoses of mostly low-grade prostate-cancer.

Put it all together, and a GLP-1-finasteride-tadalafil protocol seems weirdly beneficial. In all seriousness, I am definitely not suggesting that otherwise healthy people start microdosing ED pills. The most consequential point here is that many drugs, both approved and unapproved, have surprising side effects that often go unrecognized for years or decades. It would be wise to find ways to unleash LLM technology to discover surprising benefits lurking in discarded clinical trial results.

7. Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to other people?

One of my favorite conversations on Plain English in the last few months was my talk with the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard about her grand theory of the uni-context. For the purposes of the following paragraphs, I would define the uni-context as the ethical and value-based consequences of telecommunications technology making everybody feel as though they live in the same universal room together. Callard predicts that the uni-context nudges people to focus on negativity over positivity and identity over character, because in both cases, the former is more context-independent. (That is, I am a white guy in every context, but I am only jealous or patient in certain contexts, so my identity as a man is more context-independent than my character.)

I was particularly struck my Callard’s observations about comparison and envy. She asks us to imagine two schools in separate school districts. One day, the districts are redrawn, and the schools are in put in the same district. Suddenly, they are in competition. Parents now compare the schools as if they exist in one evaluative field. Over time, the schools might become more similar, or they might specialize to become more different. Either way, they change as they become part of the same evaluative field.

It is such a simple story. And I think it’s a stunning metaphor for life online. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, we see people just like us. They are happier or sadder, richer or poorer, funnier or crazier. They are small faces on a screen, just as we are. Life online seems to place us in the same evaluative field as thousands of strangers who are often more successful than us along some dimension, which makes it impossible to avoid comparing ourselves to them, or feeling a bit jealous of their success, or feeling quite righteous when we learn of their downfall. Jealousy and schadenfreude are more ancient than broadband technology. But there really is something about living in a universal room with everybody that makes it harder to live without that infamous thief of joy known as comparison.

More of life feels like a competition, because the uni-context encourages strangers to imagine themselves in competition, even if they will never meet.

8. Why do we feel so much guilt?

Several critics have accused Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey of being inappropriately modern, or even woke, by replacing Odysseus’s Homeric values (glory from strength) with Christian values (guilt from victory). While much of the discourse has been extremely stupid, I’ve enjoyed thinking about the way that values have changed over the centuries, and how the Bronze Age Greeks told stories to honor values that now seem archaic to our modern sensibilities. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Ancient Greek culture used to value brute strength for its own sake, while it was Judeo-Christianity that inverted the relationship between strength and goodness and encouraged the strong to feel guilt and pity for the weak. Nietzsche revered Homer’s Odysseus much more than he respected a contemporary Christian priest.

But how would you actually prove anything like Nietzsche’s contention that values change over the millennia? One new study used large language models to trace of how Western values have changed in the last 2,000 years, based on the frequency of themes and words across 23,000 books. The researchers found that, while some values rise and fall over the millennia, “indulgence”— defined as freedom from rigid social control and a preference for fun and gratification against restraint and asceticism—is higher than ever, having basically increased steadily since the 1500s.

The chart stops in 1920. But one conclusion is that “it’s virtuous to make myself happy” might be a more popular notion today than any period in recorded history. Combined with Nietzsche’s observation, I think you could argue that moderns are both more selfish and more guilt-stricken than our ancestors. We have more thoughts about our thoughts and more feelings about our feelings. We are ever more inside our heads, with our indulgent instinct to self-soothe stuck in constant dialogue with a sibling instinct to judge ourselves for indulgences.

9. If every age of American life gets the drug it deserves, what does it say about us that cannabis is the drug of the 2020s?

Data compiled by Charles Fain Lehman finds that, for the first time ever, daily cannabis users outnumber daily users of cigarettes or alcohol. The reasons why America seems to be switching from booze to weed was the subject of this week’s podcast episode.

The big idea of the podcast is that every age of American life gets the drug it deserves. Social mid-century America was throwing cocktail parties and handing out cigarettes, while ignoring the health risks of excessive use of alcohol and tobacco. Naturally, it was an age of socialization and often unscrupulous growth. The 2020s are seeing the rise of marijuana, which, for all its pleasures, is more more likely to be used in isolation and whose users often claim (or tell themselves) that it is a therapeutic.

According to Kasey Creswell, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon, most alcohol is consumed socially. In one study, 720 drinkers were put in groups of strangers and given a cranberry vodka cocktail or a cranberry flavored placebo. Researchers concluded that alcohol “enhanced individual and group-level behaviors” associated with positive affect. People drinking around each other smiled more and felt more bonding.

Cannabis, by contrast, is more likely to be used in isolation, or among smaller groups of friends who are all getting high together. If alcohol is a drug for bonding with near strangers, cannabis seems more suited for deepening one’s experience with people (or, for me, movies) that we’ve already selected. It is the perfect drug for an age of individual indulgence, and it is notable to me that the drug of the moment is one often used for curating a carefully selected experience of interiority rather than giving ourselves over to the uncertainty of strangers.

AI is doing so many things at once that it’s hard to follow the plot. Somehow, all of this has happened in just the last two weeks:

• On July 16, the Chinese company Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a hugely impressive open-weight model that approaches the performance of the best American-made AI while costing a fraction of the price, intensifying fears that—as in so many industries—cheap Chinese products could soon overwhelm American competitors.

• On July 21, OpenAI acknowledged that one of its AI agents had escaped its testing sandbox and hacked into another company, Hugging Face, marking what seemed like the worst autonomous AI hack in recorded history … until Anthropic announced three similar breaches just one week later.

• On July 22, Alphabet disclosed that its quarterly free cash flow had turned negative for the first time in the public company’s history, as AI capital spending overtook the cash generated by its core businesses.

• On July 29, Meta announced its latest earnings, and when investors digested the results, its stock plunged nearly 10 percent in 24 hours. The company’s AI investment has obliterated free cash flow, and analysts now worry that Zuckerberg has no plan to turn his AI investment into returns.

• On July 30, one of the most famous AI funds crashed out and sold off the bulk of its portfolio, after South Korea’s AI-fueled stock boom abruptly imploded, with its major index plummeting by more than 40 percent over several trading sessions.1

If I had to shove all of these developments into one sentence, I might pick this one: The capabilities of AI are becoming more powerful, while the economic underpinnings of the AI buildout—and, as we’ll discuss, the political support for AI—are becoming more vulnerable.

Beyond the headlines, I see four main categories of risk facing AI, or four horsemen of the potential AI bubble apocalypse. They include spending risk, revenue risk, political risk, and technological risk. In today’s essay, I’m going to break down each risk and—because in this field, nothing is certain—I’ll offer my favorite counterargument to each. This way, you’ll get a sense of both why the market seems to be souring on parts of the AI megaproject and what the market and its interpreters might be missing.

Risk 1: The hyperscalers are running out of cash

Everybody’s heard the old cliché, “During a gold rush, sell shovels.” Well, the shovel-makers are overtaking the miners, which has historically been a warning sign in industrial buildouts.

Just two years ago, free cash flow2 from Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle exceeded $200 billion. Now it has collapsed to below zero. The hyperscalers have spent so heavily on AI that their capital expenditures have gobbled up their cash. Meanwhile, the companies selling chips and semiconductor equipment are sleeping on mattresses made of money: For Nvidia, Micron, Broadcom, and AMD, free cash flow has surged above $400 billion.

What do you do if you want to keep spending but you’re run out of your own cash? Borrow from someone else, of course. Today, about 30 percent of hyperscaler capex is being met with new debt. That share has tripled in the last few years. The four largest tech borrowers have issued more than $170 billion in corporate bonds this year, which is roughly the size of the UK’s entire annual budget deficit.3

I think it’s worth pausing here for a brief moment to reflect on how crazy this is. Just a few years ago, a popular criticism of the software giants—indeed, of American capitalism—was that big companies hoarded their cash piles and refused to reinvest their profits in new ideas. But that era is over. Today those same companies have depleted practically all of their cash flow. To thicken the irony, capitalism’s critics seem to hate this new era of unprecedented corporate investment even more than they than they hated the era of corporate cash hoarding. (More on that in Part 3.)

The eruption of hyperscaler debt issuance is leaving its mark on credit markets. Hyperscaler bond spreads— that is, the extra interest investors demand above US Treasury bonds to lend to companies like Microsoft and Amazon—have widened. Investors still trust the credit quality of Big Tech, but they’re asking for higher yields to absorb an unprecedented wave of AI-driven debt issuance. (Oracle is the major outlier: S&P has cut its credit rating to one notch above junk status.)

The whole thing is giving dot-com bubble vibes to some commentators. “The growing divergence that exists now and the outright negative hyperscalers price performance are reminiscent of the 1999-2000 dynamic,” Jason Hunter, an analyst at JPMorgan, wrote a few weeks ago (before some chip stocks themselves puked). Michael Cembalest of JPMorgan also noted a parallel with the late 1990s, when the companies supplying communications equipment took off while the companies buying that equipment sank under the weight of their own capital spending. As Cembalest put it memorably, you always want “the caboose going slower than the engine.” To recast in a more familiar metaphor: In a healthy buildout, the companies buying the shovels should out-earn the companies selling the shovels. But with some of the hyperscalers struggling to keep their valuations above water, that’s getting harder.

Things could get worse, as the hyperscalers’ current valuations rest on some dreamy assumptions. Consensus estimates analyzed by the Wall Street Journal project that five of the major spenders—Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Oracle—are effectively promising to double revenue over the next three years while cutting about $80 billion in operating expenses. Such an achievement would basically be unprecedented, since bringing in a lot of new business typically requires bigger sales and customer-support teams, not smaller ones. “I can’t think of a scenario where that’s ever happened before,” Kevin Koharki, an accounting professor at Purdue, told the Journal.

Bottom line: We are witnessing several paradigm shifts that should shake anybody’s confidence that they know exactly what’s coming next.

• Corporate critics used to say, “Big tech is bad, because its companies won’t deploy their cash toward new ideas.” Now they say, “Big tech is bad, because they’re spending too much cash on something terrible that we hate.”

• AI defenders used to say, “Don’t worry about an AI bubble, because the richest companies in the world can fund it with cash flow from normal operations.” Now they say, “Don’t worry about an AI bubble, because the richest companies in the world can fund it by borrowing more than the British government, as long as the market is still grading their debt as safe-ish.”

Almost every major industrial bubble has involved leverage. For years, AI advocates could correctly point out that AI was different, because the project was almost entirely funded with free cash flow. Now AI is firmly in its age of debt.

On the other hand …

There are at least three reasons to think that fears about the hyperscalers are completely overblown.

First, the Big Tech companies still have less debt as a share of their earnings than the typical S&P 500 company. (See chart below.) Even at their current torrid pace of spending, AI hyperscalers could have less debt as a share of earnings than the rest of the S&P 500 for several more years—perhaps even through the end of the decade. The forward price-to-earnings ratios of major chipmakers such as Nvidia, Broadcom, and Micron are all within the temperate zone of 10x to 25x. Judging from those numbers alone, AI seems about as financially responsible as a moonshot can get.

Second, as the investor Gavin Baker has argued, the Big Tech companies have extremely strong core businesses4. Companies with big cloud divisions are making a lot of money from AI—just look at the huge recent earnings from Microsoft and Amazon—and they’re about to make even more when cheap GPU contracts end, and the cloud companies can charge higher prices to match surging demand for agents. With more cash coming in the door, their borrowing needs might moderate, and their credit spreads might come down. The real thing to worry about, Baker counsels, is the boring physical problem: building power plants and plugging in all these computers fast enough.

Third, the bubble years of the late 1990s had several key macroeconomic features, such as declining profit margins and a widening current account deficit, that are absent in today’s markets. In fact, US corporate profits remain near record levels.

Risk 2: Are the Chinese coming for America’s profits?

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In 1991, Pfizer tested a new compound called sildenafil as a treatment for heart disease. The drug failed. But the men in the trial reported a weird side effect: erections. Pfizer got the message. Years later, sildenafil was approved as Viagra. Decades later, a diabetes drug called semaglutide showed another curious side effect: patients lost a ton of weight. When molecule became better known as Ozempic or Wegovy, an entire industry was born.

These stories are told as happy accidents. But they shouldn’t be accidents. Thousands of drugs, both failed and approved, sit in trial data that almost nobody reads twice. AI is perfectly suited to reading it a second, third, and billionth time by scanning the trial results for signals that human scientists missed and flagging old compounds that might treat diseases nobody thought to test them against.

Artificial intelligence advocates love to promise that AI will one day cure every disease through sheer genius. But intelligence is not the only bottleneck to medical progress. Curing diseases in our lifetime will require ingenious policy that puts AI to work in the right way. In today’s guest article, Deena Mousa, a program officer at Coefficient Giving, who writes the newsletter Under Development, outlines how government policy could marshal AI for the discovery and development life-saving drugs—including by forcing pharmaceutical companies to quickly make public all clinical trial results, including failed ones, so that we get more discoveries like Viagra and GLP-1s.

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Medicine is at the center of almost every optimistic and even utopian vision of how AI could change the world.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has argued that AI could compress a hundred years of medical progress into a decade, ending most infectious diseases, eliminating most cancers, preventing Alzheimer’s, and doubling the human lifespan. Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind, told CBS’s 60 Minutes that the decade-long, billion-dollar slog of designing a single drug could soon shrink to months or even weeks. Asked about AI curing all diseases within ten years, he said “I don’t see why not.”

These are exciting ideas. When it comes to exactly how this will happen, however, many forecasts steamroll through the messy details. For example, Amodei’s essay Machines of Loving Grace notes that intelligence is one “factor of production,” and that its complements—like data, or the speed of physical experiments—might constrain even a super-intelligence. However, he argues that a clever enough AI will eventually route around most of these constraints in time by, for example, producing drugs so much more effective than the ones we have today that they will clear trials and win regulatory approval faster.

Maybe.

But the barriers to technology solving all of our problems are all too easy to underestimate. For example, after the model Watson won Jeopardy! in 2011, IBM trained a version of it to recommend cancer treatments and promised that it would bring expert-level care to hospitals everywhere. It didn’t really work. One limitation was that the system had been trained on a small number of hypothetical patient cases devised by a few doctors, rather than on large amounts of real patient data.

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait and hope for a superintelligent system to somehow bypass outdated institutions and fill in missing information. Deliberate choices today, especially by the US government, can make it more likely that AI contributes to a golden age of drug discovery and life extension in the next few years.

Here are three things we should do.

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1. Build an “internet of the human body”

Large language models do better with more data. For example, they are proficient writers precisely because they have been trained on the internet, which, as we all know, has quite a bit of writing.

The same principle applies to science. AlphaFold can predict the 3D structure of proteins, in large part because of the existence of the Protein Data Bank, where roughly 200,000 protein structures have been painstakingly organized by researchers over 50 years.

Unfortunately, the Protein Data Bank is a uniquely comprehensive project, and most of human biology is not similarly well-documented. Biological data often has to be generated through physical lab work, for example by culturing cells or dosing an animal and then waiting for a result. The time, labor, equipment, and materials required to do this are much greater than those required to generate text or code. The human body is also made up of many complicated interacting systems, so it’s very hard to isolate causal effects, and many of our measurement tools are imperfect and noisy.

Public data is a public good; no one can be prevented from using it, and its benefits accrue widely. As a result, private actors do not have much of an incentive to produce it. When data is produced, it’s often locked up behind regulations, as in the case of individual health records, or behind commercial secrecy, as in the case of many pharmaceutical trials.

So how could the US government stimulate the creation of an “internet” of public data about the human body that we could use to train AI?

We could start by enforcing the law. American regulations already require the results of most clinical trials to be posted publicly within a year. This rule is widely flouted. Only about 41 percent of trials are reported on time, and roughly a third are never reported at all. Many of these trials were funded by the U.S. government itself. The law allows fines of roughly $10,000 a day for noncompliance, but the FDA has issued only a handful of formal notices and, as far as the public record shows, has never actually collected a penalty.

We could extend these disclosure requirements to failed clinical trials and other shelved data. Drug companies sit on decades of results for compounds that failed or were shelved for other reasons. That information would be extremely valuable in the public domain, both because it contains a record of what didn’t work, and because those trials often capture many secondary outcome measures on which the drug might have shown more promise, but which were less of a commercial priority for that particular company.

Many people today are familiar with the story of how GLP-1 drugs were originally intended to treat type 2 diabetes until scientists observed significant weight loss among patients. In another famous case, Pfizer’s trial for sildenafil as a heart drug and treatment for angina failed, but men in the trials reported unexpected erections. The compound was later reborn as Viagra. Pfizer pursued that use because it addressed a large and profitable market. But if the signal had been more obscure or seemed less financially worthwhile, the research and drug could easily have been shelved for years. If all clinical trials were made public, private and philanthropic actors alike could set frontier AI models loose on them to identify similar findings. In short, imagine all of the treatments and cures we might have for any number of conditions if the serendipitous discoveries like Ozempic and Viagra became the norm.

The US government could also expand funding to build new publicly accessible medical datasets, like the Protein Data Bank. The Arc Institute, a nonprofit lab, has assembled an open “Virtual Cell Atlas” of measurements from more than 600 million cells (including a dataset mapping how 50 cancer cell lines respond to more than a thousand different drugs)—and released it for anyone to use in training models. Directly funding the creation of specific datasets like this is one path. Another is to create prizes and advance purchase commitments specifically for datasets, rather than focusing only on finished drugs. A model trained on a map of how drugs affect living cells could help predict how an untested compound will act on cells before researchers run costly and time-consuming experiments. Narrowing a vast search space to the few candidates worth the lab time would significantly accelerate the discovery of new medicines.

2. Take on the diseases that capitalism has ignored

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The Odyssey is everywhere right now. Christopher Nolan’s film is conquering the box office, spawning online memes, and dominating online discourse. If you rip your eyes away from your feeds, and turn your attention to another book or film, you might find Homer’s epic dwelling there, too. As the author and translator Daniel Mendelsohn has observed, the story of “the hero, separated from home and loved ones, who wanders among strange peoples and fantastical places during a difficult journey home” is The Wizard of Oz, Finding Nemo, Dante’s Inferno, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, and even Nolan’s own films Inception and Interstellar. The hero who uses disguise to test the loyalty of those around him has been recycled in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. The poem’s fascination with alien creatures—like Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops Polyphemus—could even be seen as a kind of ancient recipe for Star Trek.

But in an equally true way, Homer’s Odyssey is not everywhere. It is nowhere. This is an alien story about alien values from an alien world. It is a 2,500-year-old poem about a 3,000-year-old story from a Bronze Age that is as dead and buried as the heights of Troy. The values of The Iliad and The Odyssey are blessedly passé, including their bloody warrior culture and their fixation with an antiquated vision of glory through brute strength, which was often purchased through the spilling of blood and the keeping of slaves.

For the last few weeks, there has been a ferocious debate about whether Christopher Nolan’s movie properly honors the original text. Is it okay that Helen of Troy is portrayed by a Black actress? Is it okay that Matt Damon’s Odysseus seems traumatized by the sacking of Troy, in a way that feels like he’d qualify for PTSD treatment from Veterans Affairs? The most interesting (and also, the dumbest) questions that people are asking about The Odyssey are fundamentally questions of translation. They are all versions of an underlying anxiety, which is something like: What is the duty of modern artists when translating ancient works for a modern audience?

Well, I thought, who better to answer that question than the famed classicist whose translation of The Odyssey reportedly inspired Nolan’s own screenplay and film. Today’s interview is with Emily Wilson, who has expanded on her celebrated translations of Homer with her new book Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. We talk about the art of translation, her views on Nolan’s film, and the eternal struggle of modern artists to balance familiarity and estrangement when they take on the task of making the ancients modern.

The Odyssey Is Older and Weirder Than Most People Think

Derek Thompson: Many people today want Homer to sound ancient. “Ancient” to us sounds like elevated Shakespearean language. Shakespeare’s work is about 400 years old. But Shakespeare himself was born some 2,500 years after Homer. We are far closer to Shakespeare than Shakespeare was to Homer. So this idea that “old equals Shakespeare” makes no sense. Shakespeare was extremely modern compared to Homer. How do you think about making something for modern audiences that is so old that it makes what we consider old seem relatively young?

Emily Wilson: Homer is Bronze Age poetry. In fact, he’s archaic-era poetry that reflects a folk memory of the Bronze Age. It’s very important to realize that we need to constantly defamiliarize and be open to how very strange these poems are, and to the fact that they were always strange. They were always mythical. They evoked a world that never actually fully existed in the way it is represented in The Odyssey. I don’t believe that in archaic or Mycenaean Greece there were goddesses descending to talk to people. And the poem reflects multiple different eras in history, because it’s based on this long preexisting oral tradition.

In order to evoke that experience of going on a poetic time machine, I think it’s useful to constantly remind yourself that your job isn’t to pretend you’re taking the reader back in time 50 years. That’s not nearly far enough. I need to convey the vividness of the storytelling, the humanity of the characters, and then lull you into a false sense of security. And then you’ll be like, “wait, why is this character wailing and slapping his thighs and slaughtering 500 cattle?” If you come at the poem with the most boring kinds of strangeness up front, like putting the verb in the wrong place, that distracts the audience from what’s fundamentally strange in Homer.

Thompson: Has the definition of what is a good translation changed?

Wilson: The norms governing what counts as a good translation have definitely changed, especially in the case of translations from Latin and ancient Greek. The 18th century poet Alexander Pope, like me, wrote a big bestseller by managing to translate Homer at a time when his culture was very much ready for it. He uses wonderful, ornate rhyming couplets, and he is both responding to the existing Augustan norms and reshaping that culture. There’s always in translation, especially of an old text, this interaction between, “I’m going to familiarize it,” and “I’m going to domesticate it,” and “I’m also going to reshape the possibilities in the receiving culture by bringing something alien into our culture and making us able to respond to it.” Before the Pope translations, English readers were really suspicious of Homer. They assumed that of course, if you’re going to read a canonical classic, you go for Virgil. He was the ornate stately classical one. Homer has things like people falling over in the manure, and the whole structure of his narrative is really weird.

Thompson: Was The Odyssey always so central to our conceptualization of Western literature and storytelling, or is its fame a somewhat modern development?

Wilson: People sometimes think the canon means the great books that have absolutely always been read and always been interpreted in exactly the same way. That’s historically false. The Iliad and The Odyssey have only been translated into modern vernacular languages very, very recently in the big picture. It’s only been about 400 years in English. In the Middle Ages, people were not reading Homer. They were reading summaries of myths about the Trojan War, and they were reading Virgil’s Aeneid, but they were definitely not reading The Odyssey.

Dueling Translations of Homer’s First Sentence

Thompson: I think it’d be fun to go through one passage in The Odyssey and hear how different translators dealt with the opening lines. Let’s begin with Alexander Pope.

The man for wisdom’s various arts renowned
Long exercised in woes, O muse, resound
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy and razed her heaven-built wall.

Now here is E.V. Rieu, revised by Peter Jones in 1991, which is the version most commonly read in the UK. It’s a sentence of prose. It’s not even poetry.

Tell me, Muse, the story of that resourceful man who was driven to wander far and wide after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy.

We compare that with Robert Fitzgerald, from 1961, which you call a far more elegant version written in largely iambic rhythm.

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.

And now the version that I read as a freshman in high school in the year 2000, by Robert Fagles, in free verse.

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns …
driven time and again off course once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

How would you, almost as an English teacher, explain the differences among these treatments of the first sentence?

Wilson: We could easily spend the whole hour just on these lovely little case studies. One thing to consider is how each of them expands on the original. Pope’s translation, by modern norms, is more like a riff. If you tried to pass that off as a translation in the 21st century, people would be really disturbed. They might say, this is an amazing poem, but what does it have to do with Homer? You made most of that up. For instance, “the man for wisdom’s various arts renowned.” I love that. There is nothing in the original either about renown or about wisdom. That’s just not there. It’s wonderful, but it’s totally made up.

The 20th century translations have a closer relationship to the original. One way to narrow this down is to focus on that very marked and super interesting epithet in the first line, polytropon, which the Rieu translation renders as “resourceful.” In the original, it suggests a twisty-turny-ness in the protagonist.

Then I love the Fitzgerald use of, “Sing in me and through me tell the story,” which again is totally made up. It’s just moi, one word, to me. That’s it. Fitzgerald is extrapolating by claiming to be a vessel of divine inspiration. It’s lovely, but it makes you think you’re in the world of the Hebrew Psalms rather than the world of Homeric archaic poetry. I also really love the way he makes it more grand by saying “Sing!” But the original verb ennepe is related to epos, which means “word.” It doesn’t mean sing. And it really matters that The Odyssey begins with a verb meaning “to tell.” The Iliad has a verb meaning “sing.” These poems are always in dialogue with each other. The Iliad is going for a different kind of discourse right at the start. So the choice to make The Odyssey “sing” messes up the contrast between those two invocations.

Fagles is popular for a reason and was a bestseller for many years. There are ways that Fagles is constantly drawing on previous translators. It’s notable that Fitzgerald uses “sing,” so of course Fagles is going to use “sing” too, even though the Greek doesn’t say sing. Fagles also modernizes and Americanizes. To me, it’s a very domesticating translation. In what you just read, the introduction of “time and again” is a modern American cliché. There’s no corresponding Greek word equivalent to time, no word equivalent to again. There’s a sense of multiplicity, but it doesn’t say time and again. It’s poetic and chatty at the same time. It’s bombastic but also colloquial. That’s the sweet spot Fagles manages to achieve.

Thompson: And now, your own translation.

Tell me about a complicated man,
Muse, who was lost so long and fled so far,
When he had sacked the sacred citadel
Of Troy, and how he saw and understood
So many people and so many places
And suffered so much in his heart at sea
As he was struggling to save his life
And bring his men back home.

Two things occurred to me. One, there’s a vernacular to it. I am not reading an attempt to do Hebrew poetry for a 21st-century audience. I am reading someone who wants to speak to a 21st-century audience in the language a 21st century audience would understand. But there’s also meter and there’s alliteration. You are well known for having chosen this word, “complicated,” which is not the direct translation of polytropon, which would be something like “many-turny.”

Wilson: Nobody has gone with “many-turny,” because it would be pretty bad.

Thompson: Complicated is a word that someone in 2026 might hear every day.

Wilson: You’re absolutely right about what I’m going for. I want there to be very marked poetic qualities to the language, because there are such qualities in the original, which includes traditional meter and alliteration. I’m trying to echo this alliterative quality to the poetics of the original. But also there’s a straightforwardness to the syntax, and a straightforwardness to at least some of the word choices, like andra, man, or moi, me. Those are not difficult words in archaic or classical Greek. To make them more vocabulary-ish in English is to add a different kind of poetics, and a quite modern idea that poetic has to mean super fancy, which I don’t think is how the ancient Greeks thought about it.

Like so many translation choices, you are always wrestling with something fundamentally impossible. I think all the time about how democracy is the worst ever political system except for all the others. “Complicated” is the worst choice except for all the others. It’s not “of twists and turns.” I have no idea what that is. Or “a man of far journeys.” I have no idea what that is. It’s not really English.

Complicated, as you say, is an actual word. We have uses of it in later Greek writers, including a reference to Hermes as also polytropos. It’s used to apply to situations, to diseases. Plato has a really interesting discussion of how the truthfulness and straightforwardness of Achilles contrasts with the polytropia of Odysseus. Plato clearly has an idea that this could be a little bit negative, but maybe not entirely. So it shouldn’t be just, “Yay, our great guy,” because that doesn’t seem to be how ancient people read that word. And at the same time, it is a single four-syllable word that I want to fit into a meter, because the original is a single four-syllable word. I felt complicated covers a lot of the bases, because it hints at both, this is going to be a protagonist who will have many different layers and guises and turns, and will take many turns in his journey. And it doesn’t fully play all the cards, which the original also doesn’t.

On Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’

Thompson: What did you think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey?

Wilson: It is a big spectacle, and it is a fun time at the movies. My teenagers really loved it, and it was fun to go with my teenagers. It’s a fun summer action movie. And it’s also very much a Nolan movie. I personally really like Nolan. I very much liked his early work. I liked Following. I liked Memento. Since then, he’s received these huge budgets, and I am constantly wrestling with the feeling that he’s a very good short story writer who’s always writing a 400-page novel, because he’s got the budget for it. It’s got this quite small-scale clever gimmick about narrative, but then it’s blown up to an enormous IMAX scale. I don’t think it’s a complicated movie. And I don’t think it’s even about a complicated man. I think it’s a quite simple action hero movie about an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero.

Thompson: What is the biggest difference between the Odysseus you wrestled with on the page and the Matt Damon character you saw on the screen?

Wilson: Homer’s Odysseus is a complicated man, polytropos, whereas Matt Damon in the film is traumatized Jason Bourne. He’s an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero. The Odysseus of the Greek poem is complicated. He’s very smart, very good at problem-solving, very crafty, very good at being in multiple disguises, being a different person depending on who he’s talking to, coming up with clever schemes like telling the cyclops his name is “No Man,” such that when the Cyclops cries out that “No Man is hurting him,” the other Cyclopes will think, oh, if no man hurting you, you’re fine, no problem. All of that is erased from the Nolan movie. There’s no Cyclops trick. There’s no comedy. Matt Damon isn’t required to be be scheming. We don’t even see him building the Trojan Horse, which I thought was an interesting choice. We have this tech hero, but we don’t see him building his tech. We see him agonizing about the results of the tech.

Thompson: It was interesting to me because there is a role Matt Damon has very famously played which that polytropos and cunning. In 1999, in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon lied and lied and lied his way to the upper class, even when it meant having to commit some atrocities on the high seas. This performance is not that. This is a Matt Damon performance of a mostly virtuous and ultimately guilt-laden warrior who is a classic leader of men from the first minute to the end.

Wilson: When the casting was announced, it was Ripley that gave me hope in terms of where this might go with Matt Damon as Odysseus. But you’re absolutely right that it’s a Nolan reinvention. And of course Nolan is completely within his rights to reinvent in whatever way he sees fit. It’s not easy to cram the whole Odyssey into three hours and make this ancient epic poem into a Hollywood spectacle. You’re inevitably going to leave things out. You’re inevitably going to make choices. And if we look at the longer tradition, Virgil’s version of cruel Ulysses is not the same as Homer’s heroically and gloriously scheming Odysseus. There have been reinventions of this character for many hundreds of years, and Nolan won’t be the last.

Thompson: Is it possible that the Homeric Odysseus is un-filmable, for one of two reasons? Number one, there’s a tolerance for ambiguity in the poem that doesn’t exist in the assumed audience for Hollywood blockbusters. And two, this was written 3,000 years ago, when attitudes toward women and slaves and warrior culture and glory and gods were so different. Perhaps it would be kind of insane for Christopher Nolan to accept $250 million from a studio and spend it on a man whose values are utterly unrecognizable to an American audience.

Wilson: I think they would be, but I would dispute the idea that all films, as opposed to a summer blockbuster, are incapable of conveying ambiguity. We already talked about Patricia Highsmith and the Mr. Ripley. Modern culture, including modern TV and modern cinema, has a great many ambiguous bad-guy heroes. We’ve all watched Breaking Bad.

Thompson: Or Tony Soprano.

Wilson: Tony Soprano. We’re in the age of these gangster con-man anti-hero representations in a lot of serious pop culture. So I don’t think it’s the case that we can’t tolerate representations of quote unquote heroes who might be very damaging to their communities, their families, through whatever their quest is. It’s something 21st century readers and viewers are very much interested in. That was part of why I felt a little disappointed that Nolan was going for the easy idealization narrative, as opposed to things that are very much available to a modern viewer if you trust the viewer to be open to just a tiny notch more complexity than this movie was allowing us to have.

And then on the question of the social changes, of course this is a poem that represents a society in which slavery is normalized, in which the dominance of the elite man over his household, including over his wife and his whole entourage of enslaved people, is completely normalized. And yet at the same time, the original Odyssey gives us real insight into the perspectives of those he subordinates, those he marries, those he has sex with. We get to understand how Penelope feels. How does it feel to be one of those slave women who get killed by Telemachus, which I suspect Tom Holland’s agent said, don’t put that one in.

One of the things I did find frustrating about the Nolan movie was that we are asked to pity the warrior, but we never get a sense that those he kills are also human beings. All of the Trojans wear masks as if they were robots. Homer never does that.

Thompson: Except for the Zendaya character, where the conflation of the girl who’s killed in Troy and the Athena sculpture that’s decapitated is maybe the most effective and brilliant reconceptualization of the film.

Wilson: She’s his conscience come to life. She’s the one moment when we might get at least a little glimpse of the perspective of the victims. But insofar as she seems to have a perspective, she’s influencing Matt Damon to go back home and kill some more people who are presented in a cartoonishly villainous way. There is an empathy that both the Odyssey and the Iliad have in understanding that the Trojans are just as human as the Greeks. Polyphemus, the Cyclops, yes, he’s a giant, and yes, he eats people, we don’t like that, but he also has a favorite sheep. He’s a big human being with some scary food ways, but he’s not completely dehumanized. He’s not a puppet. Whereas the Nolan film makes everyone who isn’t Matt Damon into a bit of a puppet.

Thompson: There are at least two ways I think Nolan’s Odyssey respected the Odyssey I read in your translation. One is the braided storytelling. You’ll have a dinner between Telemachus and Menelaus, and Telemachus will say, “tell me about dad!” and Menelaus will say, okay, sure. And then you have this vivid scene from Troy that unspools for so long you forget it’s a flashback from a dinner scene. That recapitulates a lot of the Odyssey, which is constantly stories within stories within stories.

The second is this quote from Nolan:

“I wanted the world of the Odyssey to feel like a world that a modern audience could relate to. We didn’t want it to look or sound like previous movies set during antiquity, as many of them take their cues from certain periods of art and music like neoclassical painting from 18th and 19th century Europe or romantic era orchestral compositions. We wanted an earthy, modern, relatable tone to ground the story.”

If you took that paragraph and put it in your introduction to the Odyssey, I could imagine you having a similar goal. How do you feel about the effectiveness of the film at narrative braiding and at trying to sound straightforward rather than gussied up and Shakespearean?

Wilson: I love that focus on the braided narrative. Nolan has said that he realized belatedly that he’d been making the Odyssey all his career. He’s always had these obsessions with narratives within narratives, and with stories that get reinterpreted later, where you understand later that’s what that meant. And the stories-within-stories mode comes directly from Homer within our tradition. I really thought he was in some ways the ideal director from that perspective, from his real affinity for stories about memory, stories about storytelling, stories about time.

In terms of the earthiness, I like the focus on trying to defamiliarize. There are ways this film is pushing back against the swords-and-sandals tradition of Spartacus or Cleopatra or even the Petersen movie Troy from 20 years ago. It’s trying to give us a different visual palette and a different audio palette, with the lack of the symphony. It’s a lot of very loud noises instead of the surging string section. In terms of whether it actually feels earthy, to me it seemed like, okay, we’re in House of the Dragon. It’s faux medieval. I wasn’t sure it felt earthy. It felt very Hollywood and very TV-ish on the big screen. I like that he’s trying something new. I’m just not 100% convinced that for me it totally worked aesthetically.

The Right-Wing Online Discourse About The Odyssey

Thompson: The discourse around the Odyssey has been … interesting. Complicated is another way to put it. From the right, there’s been a great fixation on the ethnicity of certain cast members, like Helen of Troy, and interest in the fact that the film is not a proper representation of the era when the Odyssey might have first been written down. There’s something interesting about that reaction, because it’s simultaneously reactionary and also somewhat modern, this idea that the Odyssey as a 2026 movie must be as close to a documentary of 900 BCE as possible, and anything that isn’t perfectly documentarian is therefore woke.

In Alexander Pope’s time, you didn’t have a lot of people affronted by the fact that Pope completely made up the first two sentences of his Odyssey, because it was beautiful poetry, and what is good is what is beautiful poetry. What have you made of the discourse of the right?

Wilson: It’s actually not that complicated. It’s people trying to come up with narratives to justify some knee-jerk desire to cast aspersions on or hate people of particular categories, and to come up with stories about why am I totally right to be consumed by online hatred, and why am I not an idiot to be wasting my life like this. For whatever reason, people seem to enjoy being angry sometimes. But I don’t think it’s particularly complicated.

And of course it’s also historically complete nonsense and a category mistake. The Homeric poems are not works of history with footnotes. They are complex epic poems composed in the archaic period but carrying this folk memory of much earlier periods. They’re a mishmash of different social periods in terms of their architecture, their armor, their social practices, the linguistic forms we find in the poems. So the idea of getting back to the real Homer, and the real Homer being Mycenaean, is wrong. Homer isn’t Mycenaean. There’s no poetry composed in Linear B, which is the writing of the Mycenaeans. All of that is historically nonsense in my opinion, as well as nonsense in literary scholarship terms, because Homer was a poet, not a historian.

The Odyssey is in many ways filtering preexisting myth to make it resonate with its own time, with the archaic period, with the seventh century BCE, which is a time of protoglobalization, of migration of Greek speakers, of colonization, of interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks. The whole question of can Greeks meld together, and what is it to be Greek versus to be a non-Greek. And these questions about new technology, with both iron and writing coming into being in the archaic period. New kinds of cleverness. The poem is wrestling with those questions, and wrestling with Odysseus as this culture hero who can straddle two time periods. He can use bronze, but then look what he’s going to do when he gets back home. I’m the master of iron as well. I can move from one time to another. I’m like the sun god who represents time. I can stop time. I can go back in time. I can also go forward in time. And the Odyssey itself is playing around with time and history.

So the idea that there’s one time we need to locate the Odyssey in and make it historically authentic? Homer did not do that. The famous boar’s tooth helmet described in Book 10 of the Iliad is a much older kind of helmet than the helmets they usually wear in the Homeric poems. If you’re going to be authentic, you need to make them all wear the same kind of helmet. So all of that fixation on “why are they dressed up like Batman?” … well, you don’t need to be authentic. You can do whatever you want. Homer was already taking huge creative liberties with time and with props and with language.

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

• Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?

• Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?

• Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?

• And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?

A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.

But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.

One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?

Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding.

Here is our conversation, edited for clarity, brevity, and simplicity’s sake.

The Uni-Context, Explained

Derek Thompson: What is the uni-context?

Agnes Callard: Let’s start with the word context. A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.

The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.

Thompson: Is the uni-context a purely technological phenomenon?

I just wrote an article about what America was like in 1926, based on a social science survey called Recent Social Trends, published in 1933. The authors claim that the radio was destroying individuality, because it took people who used to be settled in rooms and it exploded their brains to become present all over the world simultaneously. Radio was demolishing the idea of a local individual, because suddenly we all became global citizens.

So one story you could tell is that the last 150 years of telecommunications technology have taken “local” individuals, who occupy one room at a time, and made us into global beings who are simultaneously in every room, at once. Is the uni-context just technology or is it technology plus something else?

Callard: It’s technology plus something else. What the techno-determinism angle misses is: Why did these technologies catch on in the first place? Why was radio popular? Why did we come up with new things—television, smartphones—and why did they catch on, too? Not every technology people have invented has caught on the way these forms have. They caught on in large part because of this impulse people have to live in a uni-context.

Thompson: Does the uni-context flow out of this adventurousness in the human spirit to become bigger than ourselves, to be everywhere, and to know everything?

Callard: Yeah, it absolutely does. There’s a conversational relationship between these technologies and a human impulse that interacts with them. They facilitate the expression of an impulse; if they didn’t, they would flop as technologies. We need to explain why they were popular; why they became the subject of obsessive use; and what their popularity reveals, as a humans’ impatience with being trapped in a small world that presents itself as all of reality but you know it isn’t.

There is a drive to be bigger than yourself. It leads people to adventure, but adventure just takes you to a different place. The uni-context takes you to a different set of norms, a much more radical change, a push to live in something like a fully open reality.

The Uni-Context Explains … Why Everyone Talks About How Everything Sucks All the Time

Thompson: I want to get into some implications of the uni-context. If I put on the goggles of the uni-context, what makes sense that previously did not? One of those things is the rise of negativity bias. When you go online, there’s so much emphasis on people posting about what is bad. Why would this theory explain a world in which people are more focused on bad things than good things?

Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re being subjected to one of those, you can interpret it as suffering and understand it.

So we should predict that what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. Take two strangers on the internet trying to talk to each other. What are they going to coordinate on as a topic they can both care about? It’s likely going to be something bad.

Thompson: It’s almost like you’re saying the audience for the bad tends to be more global than the audience for the good.

Take food. If I think chicken enchiladas are really delicious, that might be interesting to my wife or my neighbor in the context of our home. But the fact that I think chicken enchiladas are delicious is incredibly boring for posting on Twitter, a place that cuts across contexts. It’s more interesting for me to say white Americans who eat chicken enchiladas are racist against Mexican culture, because the concept of racism clicks into a global norm of badness.

So when people go online, when it’s suddenly one to a million, there is an inclination to make those posts negative. Condemnation spreads further because it cuts across all these contexts. Is that a fair way of recapitulating how the uni-context would predict that modern communication would be more fixated on criticism and badness?

Callard: That seems right. Let me make one corrective and add a point. You might say your chicken enchilada thing just isn’t that important or good. But let’s say something really good happened. Someone in Iran wrote an amazing poem. Even then, well, they wrote it in a language a lot of us don’t speak, and we need time to evaluate and culturally assimilate it. So even pretty significant goods are going to be throttled in their ability to reach a substantial audience. From chicken enchiladas to great works of art, we’ve got the same problem.

Thompson: When we spoke on the phone about the uni-context, you told me a story about being a professor that seems like a great example of this principle. Can you tell that story?

Callard: One way I illustrate the norms that are distinctively uni-contextual, and contrast them with our older multi-contextual norms, is to think about ways I might correct a student. Suppose they come late to class, or interrupt another student, or raise their hand to say something that has nothing to do with what the previous person just said. Those are all ways I can correct a student in my capacity as teacher. The other students cannot make those corrections.

But now imagine that a student makes a sexist or racist comment. I can correct that too, but so can another student in the class. The other students are in a totally parallel position to me when it comes to the uni-contextual norms. Those are not role-dependent.

Let me add something about the idea that the audience is global. I want to distinguish between a situation in which a lot of people from a lot of cultures are accessing the same information and one in which people are accessing it from a lot of different contexts. Imagine it was just New Yorkers on the internet. Those New Yorkers would be accessing the internet from different places, in different moods, at different times of day. One might be at a bar, while another might be talking to their kids. Is there something good for all New Yorkers all the time, irrespective of their age, wherever they are, and at whatever time of day it is? No. The same point holds. They are going to focus on the negative as well.

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The Uni-context Explains … Why Identity Has Become More Important Than Character

Thompson: Another implication is the way the uni-context makes identity more important than character. Can you explain how, and why?

Callard: First, let’s define what character is. The fact that I have to tell you is itself telling; that word is less familiar to us. Everyone knows what identity is, but we might not be sure what character is anymore. Character refers to a set of dispositions that shape how you navigate your emotional life across a variety of circumstances. A courageous person navigates their emotional life in relation to fear. You could be anger-prone, or generous. Your character is a set of dispositions that determine how you respond to a big variety of circumstances.

The thing about character is that it shows up differently in different circumstances. Say I’m irascible, easily provoked to anger. Even an irascible person isn’t angry all the time. There might be circumstances where everybody gets angry, and so you can’t see my irascibility, because even though I’m angry, so is everybody else. Grasping character requires a lot of context. To understand someone’s character, you need to know them well and to have experienced them in a variety of contexts before you can generalize.

With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance. There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman. Identity is a hat you never take off. So identity is well suited to a uni-contextual world.

Thompson: This reminds me of political discourse on the left and the right, which tends to focus on identity rather than characters. You have these debates about identities are good, which identities are powerful and oppressive, which identities are powerless and oppressed, which have protection, which have too much protection. It’s not that those categories aren’t important. They are. But I’m reflecting now on the gap between how frequently we talk about identity and how infrequently we talk about character in the national discourse.

Callard: Yes, in two ways.

What goes along with the identity logic of the uni-context is a specific form of ethics that dictates how we talk about identity, and it covers who’s powerful and who needs protecting, namely the ethics of inclusion. Our fundamental concern in relation to identity is that there are identities that might be excluded. Depending on where you are politically, you have your sights on different identity categories, but everybody’s worried about that. That’s a fundamental form of ethics of the uni-context, because the one thing the uni-context has to be is a space for everybody. It’s got to be inclusive in a way that earlier societies almost everywhere were not. That word, inclusion, wasn’t a thing people talked about. It comes along with the uni-context, and the way that ethics gets focused is through identity categories.

And then, there’s virtue. Think about Aristotle, because he’s my prime example of a virtue ethicist. By its nature, virtue is a concept that privileges the good side rather than the bad. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics tells you what it is to be courageous and wise and just and generous. There are corresponding discussions of how you might go wrong. But those are predicated on first understanding the positive value of certain kinds of behavior. So virtue ethics naturally has a positivity bias that is precisely the opposite of the bias we have now.

The Uni-Context Explains … Status Anxiety, Comparison, Moneyball, and the Marketization of Everything

Thompson: Tell me if this is a fair recapitulation of our conversation so far.

For most of human history, people judged norms based on local context. A home had its own rules, a cathedral its own rules, and a classroom or bar or funeral parlor had its own rules. But now it is almost like we are constantly living in universal rooms, and the universal room we occupy is assumed to have universal values and universal norms. That has specific implications. First, rather than talk about what is good, which is context-dependent, we tend to focus about universal truths, and it’s easier to talk about universal bads than goods, so people focus on negativity. Two, character is context-dependent, so we talk less about character and more about its universalist equivalent, which is identity.

There’s a third implication that we should discuss. If everyone is on the same comparable plane, the same evaluative field, then comparison itself becomes a more inextricable part of life.

Callard: Exactly.

Thompson: Tell me how the uni-context leads to a world of more comparison and competition.

Callard: Imagine two school districts with two high schools that do things slightly differently. If you’re in district A, you go to school A, and if you’re in district B, you go to school B. There might be a lot of information about what they do, but people treat it as: I’m in this district, so I go to this school. Then they change the rule: You can go to either school no matter where you live. Suddenly there is motivation to compare. You had the information before, but no motivation to compare, because the schools were not in the same space of choice, the same evaluative field.

Now they are, so you find ways to compare them: graduation rates, what colleges people get into, how many AP classes they teach. And that affects the schools. Suppose one gets less popular because it doesn’t teach many AP classes. They were offering an individualized curriculum, but now everyone’s going to the other school, so they say, “We’ve got to teach AP classes too.” The process homogenizes the two schools, so they can compete. That’s not the only possible result. They could specialize, with one becoming the school for freshman and sophomore years, the other becoming the school for junior and senior years. But if they don’t recreate a normative barrier, you get homogenization from comparison.

As more things enter the same evaluative field, you make comparisons you never used to be able to make.

Thompson: There are three pieces I’m trying to keep straight.

One, the upstream phenomenon of the uni-context. Two, the downstream phenomenon of more fields of comparison. Three, the further downstream phenomenon of homogenization.

This is where the theory really starts to sing for me, because I think about sports. As the analytics revolution came for baseball, you had all these teams in possession of the same statistics by which they could compare players. Previously, you had 30 teams using their own private scouts, so their analysis was more context-dependent. But when an easily calculable statistic like on-base percentage or WAR becomes the conventional way to evaluate whether a player is good, all the players become part of the same comparative set. You can rank them one-to-250 easily on a spreadsheet.

But analytics didn’t just lead to more math, or more comparison. It led to more homogenization of strategy. One of the great critiques of baseball has been that every team essentially does the exact same thing: it’s the same strategies for pitchers; the same strategies for hitters; the three true outcomes; all the batters swinging for the fences. So you have the uni-context creating a comparative field, in this case analytics, which leads to homogenization.

Callard: What you said reminded me that I have a theory of the inflection point for the uni-context. I don’t think it started five or ten years ago. The moment it really showed up was around 1910.

One century ago, there were a bunch of people looking around at the world, thinking: What the hell is happening? Did culture break? A lot of those people were novelists, and they wrote a new kind of novel called the modernist novel, which is a novel about how to live in a world in which the uni-context is just coming into existence. Theorists of the time—such as Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Martin Heidegger—they noticed something weird was going on. They tended to describe it in terms that sound almost like the opposite of the uni-context. They described it as the fragmentation of everything. All of a sudden, they said, everything is breaking apart. That was my first clue.

The reason I thought of this is that you said everything is becoming homogenous, and I thought, “in a way, yes, but that’s a later effect.” The first thing that happens when a bunch of stuff is unified in a single evaluative field is that you feel overwhelmed by your choices. It feels like stuff is fragmented, because you don’t know how to compare these things, because you haven’t yet developed technologies of comparing them.

So, the early feeling of the uni-context was a feeling of the world being fragmented. If you were a medieval peasant doing art, you were in art’s normative world. If you were in the church, you were in the church’s normative world. But in the 20th century, around World War I, you start to think: How do we reconcile the schoolteacher turned murderer, the soldier? How do we think about the relationship between art and religion? We’re suddenly trying to compare all these different values inside a single context, and the world feels dis-unified. Eventually we get technologies of commensurability. What fragmentation really means—and that part was invisible to these writers—is that suddenly everything is part of the same evaluative field. That’s why you experience a multiplicity where you used to experience one thing at a time.

Thompson: I’m holding an essay by Georg Simmel you assigned me, The Metropolis and Mental Life. It was published in the early 1900s. Here’s a quote:

Money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of how much. To the extent that money can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveler. All things rest on the same level and are distinguished only by their amounts.”

Simmel is putting his finger on the idea that in the modern world, local norms are melting, and what replaces them is the psychology of money, which I’ll reframe as the psychology of markets.

What are markets very good at? Creating a single comparative field. That’s how they coordinate prices, supply and demand. It’s one thing for there to be a market for carrots and eggs. But in the dating world now there’s a marketplace of single people. In sports, a marketplace of players who can be compared by specific analytics that homogenize and flatten strategy.

So there’s a way in which your theory of the uni-context is a way of saying the modern experience is the awareness that we are all participants in a global marketplace in which we previously were not. When I’m posting something on Twitter, I know a universe of people can see it, and I’m going to be voted up and down against other people posting in those marketplaces for attention. As we coexist in more marketplaces, it changes the way we think about ourselves and our values.

Is this market language pulling away from your theory?

Callard: There’s something intuitive about the way you’re putting it. But you have to bring in Simmel’s theory of money to understand that quote.

Simmel has a book called The Philosophy of Money in which he explains what money really is, and the answer isn’t markets. That book defines money probably a hundred times, but I’ll pick one: Money is abstraction in the space of value. Money is abstract value. Every other value concept is somehow tied concretely to objects. There’s a gradual move, as Simmel understands it, toward the capacity to think more and more abstractly about value, that moves in the direction of money. But it doesn’t just move in the direction of money, it changes money.

In ancient societies, if something is worth a lot of money, it has to be represented by a large object representing the money. Then you get fiat currency. There are all kinds of changes in money that correspond to this growth of the ability to abstract value.

What Simmel would say is that the fundamental change is the rise of abstraction. We live our lives so abstractly now. If you want to say we’re in a marketplace, that’s fine as a metaphor for the idea that we are engaged in abstract value calculations that allow everything to be compared to everything else. We tend to use money and markets as a metaphor for that activity, but over the past hundred years even what money and markets are has been transformed by this process of abstraction. The deeper thread is that we live very abstractly. We manage ourselves and our experiences in very top-down ways.

The Uni-context Explains … the Attention Crisis

Thompson: Let’s go deeper on this idea that we manage ourselves in top-down ways. You think the uni-context explains our relationship to attention and distraction. Explain.

Callard: The norm for human beings is a bottom-up management of attention. You pay attention to what’s salient in your environment, and the ability to be distracted from what you’re attending to is important in a creature that might at any moment face a snarling animal or a fire. So the default is that you pay attention to what demands your attention.

What the uni-context brings is a newfound top-down management of attention, where we constantly feel that we have to make decisions about how to manage our attention. We feel constantly like we’re letting ourselves get distracted, which is another way of saying we are failing to manage our attention with an iron enough fist. We have products to help us fight against the very objects we purchase, like our phones. We’re in a war with ourselves. That war is the attempt to do top-down management on an aspect of our psychology that evolved to be more homeostatic, more responsive to an environment.

One illustration: There are a lot of 19th-century novels in which someone is reading a novel, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. It’s always a woman. This woman has a turbulent emotional life, because her lover is being problematic, so she gets distracted from the novel and puts it down. But a thing that never happens is her saying to herself, “no, I need to get through another 20 pages.” That kind of attention management—thinking, “I’m reading this book and I need to focus on it!”—is just not a thing people did in the 19th century. That shows you how different a creature the human of today is.

Thompson: The uni-context puts us in a universal room, where we become aware of more ideas, more people, more things that we could be paying attention to but aren not. Our response to this is to develop a theory of attention that treats it as a resource to manage. We think, “I have to only focus on the perfect things!” And this makes us obsessed with, and fearful of, distraction in a way that is historically unique.

Callard: It is a mark of the top-down management of attention. The question, "what should I pay attention to?” is not a function of anything about my local environment. I can’t use cues in my local environment to tell me what to attend to, because in pretty much every environment these days, there’s a screen. It’s there no matter what. It allows me to choose. It puts me in this giant evaluative field as to what I could attend to, the sufferings of people far away if I chose. So I stand in this choice relation to my attention.

That was already starting to be true with radio and newspapers. The Austrian writer Robert Musil, one of the prophets of the uni-context, wrote:

The probability of learning something unusual from a newspaper … is far greater than that of experiencing it; in other words, it is in the realm of the abstract that the more important things happen in these times, and it is the unimportant that happens in real life

That’s him saying we are in some way divorced from our local context. It’s become irrelevant to us. We live in an abstract space that requires us to manage our attention.

Judging a World We Made

Thompson: Is the uni-context good or bad?

Callard: I don’t know. I recommended that Simmel essay for a specific reason, the way it ends, where he says the metropolitan mindset is a different mood of life than anything humans have known before, but we can’t judge it, because we are its products. It is us. The idea that we can separate ourselves and stand in some relation to it and say this is good or bad is a bit of an illusion. That’s one way of thinking about this, that it’s not obvious we’re in a position to judge it. My own thought is I don’t feel ready to judge it. What the uni-context is, as I understand it, is an answer to the question, where are we? For the past bunch of years I’ve been looking around and seeing, everything is going crazy, where am I such that all this crazy stuff is happening? The uni-context is a way of answering that. It makes sense that this would be happening if that’s where I am. I thought I was in Chicago, sitting at my desk at the university. No, the whole time I was in the uni-context. The first thing we need to do is get our bearings before we start judging, because the uni-context is a super judgey place. There’s a universal moralism applicable to every situation, and getting pulled into that takes you away from trying to understand where you are.

So What? (Or: The Abiding Hunger For ‘World Openness’)

Thompson: I want to know what we should do about this.

A simple answer might be: When you’re having dinner with your family, you can be present with your family, or you can be on your phone, which is a universal room that makes you everywhere at once. So put away the phone. But that feels like a cheap and predictable answer. Do you have something prescriptive that isn’t just “put away the phone at family dinner?”

Callard: The question of whether the uni-context is good or bad is loaded, because the uni-context struggles to see good things. It’s better at seeing bad things. Pretty much everyone who hears me talk about the uni-context immediately responds that it’s bad. I’ve never had anyone say, “The uni-context sounds great!”But the thing is that this supposedly bad thing is a thing we’re creating. We’re choosing it over and over again. Even me talking to you from far away about an abstract thing [is the uni-context.]

The uni-context is a space of unruliness. It’s a space in which a certain thing about humanity gets expressed, namely our deep aversion to “world closure.” For almost all of human history, we have lived in closed little worlds, and those worlds presented themselves as the only world. A series of contexts presented the person with direction—here’s what you should do. What we are moving toward is a “world openness” that we hunger after, where I’m not just going to do things a certain way because that’s how we do things or where I was born.

I. Closing Time

Is this the end of booze?

The share of people who drink hit an all-time low last year, according to Gallup, whose data goes back to 1939. Total beer consumption recently hit a 21st-century low, and wine vineyards are reportedly “in crisis.”

In the last few years, millions of Americans, a handful of scientists, and several prominent health commentators have embraced a position on alcohol that would have seemed absurd to most Americans just 10 years ago: Any amount of alcohol, including “moderate” drinking, is bad for you.

Most social changes happen slowly, but the turn against alcohol has been sudden. The share of Americans who say moderate drinking (defined as one or two drinks a day) is “bad for health” doubled in just the last 10 years. Two-thirds of Americans under 35 now tell Gallup that alcohol is harmful in any quantity.

This alarmist viewpoint is not exactly conspiratorial nonsense. It received an endorsement from the scientific community last month, when the federal government released a controversial alcohol study, which researchers claimed was suppressed by the alcohol lobby and the government. Buoyed by the Streisand effect, and thus widely covered in the news media, this study concluded that any drop of alcohol may increase a person’s mortality, with the risk accelerating after one drink per day.

This is all quite personal for me. On the one hand, I enjoy drinking. I love a glass of wine with dinner, and I like to make cocktails—martinis, mezcal Negronis, Corpse Reviver No. 4—for friends who visit the house. On the other hand, I also enjoy being alive. I love my children, and I don’t want to miss their weddings just because my fondness for martinis prematurely killed me. This makes me highly motivated to understand the relationship between alcohol and mortality in a way that goes deeper than, say, a cursory newspaper write-up of a single alcohol study.

This article is my best attempt to summarize my understanding of the vast and flawed literature on alcohol and health.

II. A Brief History of Alcohol: Climate Change and Drunk Monkeys

It is good and useful to think of alcohol as a tasty mild poison that humans have been honed by evolution to handle in small doses, because from a biochemical and anthropological standpoint, that is precisely what alcohol is.

Ethanol is toxic to most animals. (Feed your dog a bit of leftover steak, if you wish, but don’t pair it with a glass of cab unless you are eager to pay a visit to your local vet.) Unlike most creatures with mouths and tongues, humans and a handful of apes have a genetic mutation that makes our liver enzymes 40 times more efficient at metabolizing alcohol. I would like to thank god for this mutation—as Benjamin Franklin (absolutely never) said, “beer is proof that god exists and wants us to be happy”—but anthropologists, such as Robin Dunbar, have preferred to credit ancient climate change. Tens of millions of years ago, the theory goes, the planet entered a cool, dry period, and tropical forests collapsed. Nine in ten ape species went extinct. But some common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees responded heroically to this climate catastrophe by moving to less lush ecosystems and surviving as ground foragers. That sometimes meant swapping fresh fruit on tree limbs for rotting fruit on the ground. According to the “drunken monkey” hypothesis (this is real), the apes that survived this dietary shift were the ones whose livers could tolerate the fermented ground fruit.

Eventually, humans liked the smell and taste of ethanol enough to start making it on purpose, as the Economist recounts. The first solid evidence is from nearly 10,000 years ago. Residue from jars in Jiahu, China, dating to about 10,000 years ago indicates an early form of honey wine blended with rice and fruits. Booze helped human civilization grow:

If a group has more than, say, 100 members, direct personal relationships are hard to sustain. New social mechanisms are needed to build trust among those who may not know each other well. [Robin] Dunbar argues that rituals involving mild intoxication may have kept large social groups cohesive.

Thus, our ancestors grew up and got along on booze. By jacking up serotonin and dopamine levels, alcohol makes us ebullient, less inhibited, and more attracted to potential mates. According to studies by Dunbar, social drinking forms social bonds. One of his papers shows that people who frequent local pubs have “larger and closer support networks, which are associated with greater life satisfaction and even well-being.”

But just because the human body evolved to handle a bit of alcohol better than dogs—and just because alcohol tends to facilitate social interactions—doesn’t mean that alcohol is medically good for us. So let’s turn at last to the research.

III. The Truth About Moderate Drinking, Or: Why A Drink a Day Is About as Dangerous As Your Commute

I’d like to divide the modern history of booze research into two periods, each defined by a misconception. The first was the age of the J Curve. The second is the age of zero tolerance.

For years, some scientists and commentators insisted that moderate drinking was good for you. In 1991, Morley Safer, a correspondent for CBS, recorded a segment of 60 Minutes titled “The French Paradox.” He claimed that French people live longer despite a diet heavy in fat and butter because they lubricate their arteries with pinot. “The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass” of red wine, Safer said. After the 60 Minutes episode, wine sales skyrocketed.

The French Paradox had some quasi-empirical support. Some observational studies seemed to indicate that moderate drinkers lived longer and healthier lives than abstainers. These studies claimed to find a “J curve” relationship between alcohol and mortality risk. That is, if you plot mortality risk on a Y-axis and drinks per week on the X axis, the mortality line will go down (meaning moderate drinking extends lives) before it swerves up (meaning excessive drinking kills you), making a kind of languid “J.”

The problem is that those observational studies were mostly terrible. Moderate drinkers tend to be wealthier, better educated, and more likely to exercise than heavy drinkers, so their longer lives could have been caused by a zillion factors outside of carefully sipping red wine. Meanwhile, the “abstainer” category was typically a hodgepodge of religious teetotalers, former heavy drinkers, and “sick quitters” who were too ill to imbibe.

Most alcohol researchers now agree that the J might as well stand for “junk science.” Last year, I spoke to the behavioral psychologist and health researcher Tim Stockwell who told me that he has spent “thousands and thousands of hours” reevaluating studies on alcohol and health in the last 25 years. The J-curve is almost certainly bogus, he said.

But the old assumption that moderate drinking is therapeutic has given way to a new assumption, which is that practically any drinking is bad for us. The pendulum has swung toward a neuroticism that walks and talks like a scientist but constantly oversells the dangers of a daily drink. There are two main problems with the trendy case against moderate drinking:

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One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.

The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America’s 250th birthday, I’m blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary.

In some ways, the Americas of 2026 and 1926 are eerily similar. In both cases, the country is celebrating a major birthday in the midst of a rising stock market and widespread fears of “technological unemployment” (mechanical power then vs. AI now); giddy wealth is coiled with economic anxiety; technology has transformed the way that people get information, mind-wiring us to a global cacophony of far-flung emotions (radio then vs. social media now); and after years of record-high immigrant entry to the U.S., the government has choked the migrant stream to a trickle.

In other ways, the America of 1926 was another world—practically another planet. Roughly half of the U.S. still counted as rural, and tens of millions of Americans had no indoor plumbing or electricity. Thick smoke from oil lamps filled their homes, and they emptied their bladders and bowels in old-fashioned chamber pots. Women had only voted in two presidential elections. Millions of children still worked for pay. Of the nation’s 27 million households, only 11 million had a phonograph, to listen to music, or a car. The first movie with sound would not come out for another year.

Life is much better in 2026. We live healthier, richer, and longer lives, with better medicine and more self-determination. But if I do my job well in the next few sections, you’ll see both the progress we’ve made in the last 100 years and the progress we haven’t made. Many anxieties that feel electrically charged in the present moment about work, family, and individuality are echoes of our ancestors’ fears. They felt all of our feelings. They just happened to poop in chamber pots.

1. The Average American in 1926

Before we dive into the world of 1926, let’s get into character.

Imagine that you are the typical American in 1926.1 You are a white 26-year-old. (In 2026, the median age is 40.) Since most immigrants have been male, we’ll say you’re a guy. Your name is John. Born in the first term of William McKinley’s presidency, you are raised on a farm without flush toilets or electric lighting. Too young to fight in World War I, you come of age alongside a generation that sees war in Europe as a “useless colossal blunder,” in the words of historian David M. Kennedy. Your life—indeed, your entire generation—is shaped by several notable developments: education, urbanization, automation, and women’s rights. You are the first person in your family to finish high school.

At 19, you move from the countryside to an urban apartment, as one small drop in the migratory flood from farm to city. Jobs in manufacturing and retail are easy to find. They’re also easy to lose. Temporary unemployment is the norm. You earn $100 a month and put some away for a rainy day, confident that the bustling city will provide another job in a few months. (Unemployment insurance does not exist; neither does Social Security.) In the evenings, you “radio”; yes, it’s a verb, too. Every weekend, you visit a cineplex, where the movies are black-and-white and silent. Sometimes, you down a few prohibited cocktails and go dancing with flappers. Several times a week, you drive around in a black Model T.

The year 1926 has been good to you. City life is a blur of high-velocity machines—cars, assembly lines, and radio broadcasts—and you sometimes miss the ancient rhythms of your farmland home. One year from now, Charles Lindbergh will shock the world by flying across the Atlantic. In two years, at 28, you’ll be married. In three years, you’ll have a baby. And in four years, in 1930, just months after the biggest stock market crash in American history, the world as you know it will be over.

II. The Economy of 1926

In 1926, the Roaring Twenties were at their full-throated peak. But America was anxious. If today’s commentators can’t stop talking about “maxxing” and “vibes,” the writers and politicians of the Twenties were vexed by the opposite of single-minded optimization. The watchword of the day was balance. Appearing 30 times in the Recent Social Trends report, balance was the cardinal worry of economic commentators: balance between rural and urban America; between manufacturing and farming; and between rapid progress and traditional values.

America in 1926 was smaller, and its values and identity were more twined with the countryside. The US population was about 120 million—about one-third of its current size—and nearly half of Americans lived in rural areas, compared to about 10 percent today. “In many respects, those country ways of life remained untouched by modernity,” the historian Kennedy wrote. From the Potomac River to the Gulf of Mexico, America looked “little different than it had at the end of Reconstruction”—cotton fields unfurled under a hot sun, hardly touched by electricity or modern plumbing.

The agrarian world was in a double crisis in 1926. The first problem was economic. In the 1910s, the American farmer fed the world. After World War I, global agricultural production came back online, and farmers were stuck with a ruinous surplus. The price of cotton and corn plummeted more than 50 percent from their wartime high. The second crisis was technological. The tractor and mechanical power transformed the farm, automating jobs for horses, as well as for people.2

If rural America was frozen in the ice block of history, urban America was a gushing torrent of change. By 1928, per-capita incomes of urban workers reached four times the average income of farmers. Between 1910 and 1930, the farm population declined while the urban population nearly doubled (see first graph below), thanks to both domestic migration and a wave of European immigrants (see second graph below). Much like today, the fear of historic levels of foreign-born people sparked an anti-immigrant movement. The 1920s saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which dominated the politics of several states, including Indiana and Oregon. “The nativist sentiment that the Klan helped to nurture found statutory expression in 1924,” Kennedy writes, “when Congress choked the immigrant stream to a trickle, closing the era of virtually unlimited entry to the United States.”

City dwellers were proud of their superiority; even haughty. In the previous years Scopes trial, the high-school teacher John T. Scopes had been indicted for violating Tennessee law by telling his students about evolution. Here’s Kennedy:

Urban Americans smiled with satisfaction when street-smart Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow humiliated rural America’s historical paladin, William Jennings Bryan, in the course of the trial… Bryan’s mortification symbolized for many the eclipse of rural fundamentalism and the triumphant ascendancy of the metropolis as the fount and arbiter of modern American values.

As agriculture’s share of employment plummeted from more than 50 percent in 1870 to less than 25 percent in 1926, it wasn’t just manufacturing that absorbed the expanding workforce. The share of jobs in trade and transportation (e.g., moving, storing, and selling goods in wholesale and retail trade) rose from 9 to 20 percent. Clerical services (e.g., retail salespeople and cashiers) exploded from 1 to 8 percent.

Manufacturing advanced faster than working conditions. While the 12-hour workday disappeared in the 1920s—the US Steel Corporation abandoned it in 1923—neither the two-day weekend, nor paid vacations, nor retirement existed for the average American worker.

Modern urban consumerism marched forward thanks to an explosion of chain stores. Between 1927 and 1928, Sears Roebuck sales grew by 20 percent and Safeway sales grew by nearly 50 percent.

Even more than 2026, 1926 saw a bonanza of big-company mergers, which means it was similarly an era of monopoly concerns. Between 1919 and 1928, manufacturing and mining were involved in 1,200 mergers, a record for one decade. Bank mergers were even more frequent. And practically no industry was more concentrated than electricity. By the end of the 1920s, ten public utilities controlled 75 percent of the electric light and power business while 16 holding companies controlled about 50 percent of the country’s gas output.

Nothing in 1926 roared like the automotive industry. In 1900 there were 8,000 cars on the road—or “horseless carriages,” as they were then known. By 1926, the number had grown to 19 million. “It is probable that no invention of such far-reaching importance was ever diffused with such rapidity,” the report’s authors wrote.

The automotive revolution was the great achievement of Henry Ford. It was also the apotheosis of Fordism, the theory of business that braided higher productivity, higher wages and higher spending levels. In 1910, it took roughly 15 hours to put together a single Model T Ford. By 1926, a new car rolled off Ford’s assembly line every 10 seconds. Productivity was the handmaiden of affordability: A vehicle that cost the average worker two years’ wages before World War I cost just 3 months’ earnings in the mid-1920s.

No other country rivaled America’s automotive love affair. According to the historian Bill Bryson, 1920s Kansas alone had more vehicles than France. Car ownership created an entirely new way of thinking about the self in relation to the environment—an “automobile psychology.” Social scientists spoke of the modern “gypsy family,” which seemed to spend more time inside the car than outside it. Travel time surged, and the tourist business swelled, with new “camping grounds, cabins, cottage camps, and roadside camps” dotting the landscape to serve a nation that couldn’t get enough of the road. Just as Airbnb and its brethren pushed the hotel business in the 2010s and 2020s, so did these new makeshift tourist attractions force the hotel industry to upgrade in the 1920s. With “the increase in travel by women which has been induced by the automobile,” hotels added more private bath facilities, more varied restaurant menus, and plusher room furnishings. When America made cars, cars remade America.

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III. Culture and Leisure in 1926

The year 1926 was almost certainly the high-water mark of women’s rights and liberties in American history, to date. The nearly 10 million women who worked for wages represented a doubling of the female workforce since the end of the 19th century. While the share of women working as domestic servants declined, more became teachers and hairdressers. No female occupation grew faster than the salesperson or store clerk.

After the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, women had only voted in two presidential contests by 1926. Still, there was anxiety about their acquisition of political and cultural power, which concentrated on the rise of the legendary “flapper.” These flapper gals “smoked, drank, rouged their shining faces, bobbed their hair (which is to say cut it short and even all the way around), and clad themselves in silken dresses of breathtaking skimpiness,” the historian Bill Bryson writes in One Summer: America, 1927. The shrinkage of chastity was quantifiable: The amount of fabric in the average dress fell from 20 yards in 1910 to 7 yards in the 1920s.

Anxiety about women flaunting their liberties and their thighs was an adjunct to concerns about changes to the family. With the rise of working women coinciding with an increase in divorce, the authors of Recent Social Trends mourned that homes became mere “parking places” for parents and children, whose passions resided in labor and leisure.3

Childhood was transforming just as much as womanhood in the 1920s. For the first time, half of high-school-age students attended school, an eightfold increase since 1900. Declining birthrates along with rising wealth led to fewer children and more resources devoted to each child.

The report’s authors weren’t entirely sure that the new style of parenting—eerily similar to intensive parenting phenomenon of the 2020s—was a good thing. In a passage paragraph that one could imagine reading in the New York Times tomorrow, they worried about the the declining birthrate :

For the first time there were fewer children under five years of age in one census year than in the one preceding.

For the first time also there were fewer children under five years of age than from 5 to 10 years of age. In some cities already there are not enough children to occupy the desks in the earlier grades. This decreasing enrollment has not yet reached the high schools, but it is only a question of time, unless a larger proportion of those out of school are continued in school. Though the supply of children is being restricted, the demand for them continues.

Hovering over the decade’s cultural perturbations was Prohibition, which had been the law of the land since 1920. Prohibition was bad, not only because it shut down a major industry (America’s fifth largest, at the time); not only because it moved billions of dollars from the legitimate economy into the black market, empowering the Mafia and other criminal enterprises; not only because the national murder rate went up by almost a third after Prohibition was introduced; and not only because the federal government lost about half a billion dollars in liquor taxes (10 percent of its national income); but also because it killed people directly. As an ingredient in paint thinner, antifreeze, and other goods, alcohol’s production couldn’t be fully outlawed by the government. To discourage its consumption, the government required that industrial booze be frequently laced with poison. Americans, loving booze, drank that, too.

The results were disastrous. A chemist’s survey in the New York Telegram found that one speakeasy’s spirits contained, among other things, kerosene, formaldehyde, and sulfuric acid. In their book Eating in America, Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont report that nearly 12,000 people died in 1927 from drinking poisoned alcohol. Given that the US population was roughly 66 percent smaller than it is today, that would be the mortality equivalent of 36,000 people dying in 2026 from drinking beer that had been poisoned on purpose by the feds. (That figure is, by the way, roughly the number of drivers who die annually in automobile accidents today.)

Beyond the speakeasies and jazz clubs, sports were becoming a more central part of American life, although the industry was unrecognizable to modern audiences, in large part because 1920s sports were so unprofessional. For example, while it was considered America’s pastime, baseball was a terrible business. Teams relied on ticket sales for revenue, but Sunday games were prohibited in most cities, and electric lights were a luxury. So most games had to be played during the weekdays, when few working people could attend. Ninety-minute games were common; without a big audience or big paycheck waiting for them, players seemed to be in a rush to get things over with. In one doubleheader against the New York Yankees on September 26, 1926, the St. Louis Browns won 6–1 in 72 minutes and then won 6–2 in 55 minutes. (Yes, those were two nine-inning games.) “Quite how they managed it is a wonder,” the historian Bryson writes. “The two teams banged out 25 hits between them in the first game and 20 in the second, so these were hardly classic pitchers’ duels. There was just a lot less messing around.”4

IV. Media in 1926

Unlike 2026, when we are witnessing the decline of reading, 1926 might have been a high-water mark for reading in American life. Never before had so many different print media—books, magazines, and newspapers—swelled at the same time, before sound film and television took over.

Authors were celebrities—people mobbed Sinclair Lewis’s Minnesota home while he was trying to write his novels—and books published annually had doubled since the 1910s. For those overwhelmed by so many titles, the Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926. Magazine advertising revenues grew by 500 percent in the Twenties, thanks to the birth of Reader’s Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, and The New Yorker in 1925. Newspaper sales also rose throughout the decade, and New York City alone had twelve daily papers.

This abundance of literacy was threatened by the arrival of new communications technology. Even more than telephones—which multiplied from less than 2 million units in 1900 to 20 million in 1930—radio defined the decade, evolving “from a mysterious curiosity to a widely diffused and universally accepted instrument of entertainment, business, learning and mass communication, [with] few if any counterparts in social history,” according to the authors of Recent Social Trends.

It is remarkable to read the report’s analysis of radio’s effect on American life, because it reads so alarmingly modern. Above all, the authors were concerned that radio encroached on individuality by mind-wiring each American to a global monolith of news and entertainment. Mass media organizations created “greater possibilities for social manipulation,” they wrote, and radio threatened to turn the individual into what the philosopher Martin Heidegger in this period called a “they-self”—a being who, failing to achieve authenticity, fully adopts the tastes, habits, and beliefs of the universal crowd.5

Today’s commentators sometimes fret about the role that the internet and the smartphone have played in unleashing populism, by elevating the views of the disenfranchised and smashing the authority of the elites. But 100 years ago, the authors of Recent Social Trends also saw the radio as a pure “leveling” technology:

Negroes barred from entering universities can receive instruction from the same institutions by radio; residents outside of the large cities who never have seen the inside of an opera house can become familiar with the works of the masters; communities where no hall exists large enough for a symphony concert can listen to the largest orchestras of the country; and the fortunes of a Negro comedy pair can provide social talk throughout the nation. Isolation of backward regions is lessened by the new agency of communication

Unlike print media, radio works the ear rather than the eye—the ear, which cannot close or even focus with ocular precision, but remains always open to the world. One hundred years ago, we were already making our way in a world where waves of information radiated around us, a proto-internet of sound, waiting for an audience and an antenna to tune in. Wired to the emotional values of far-flung events, Americans breathed air that pulsed with spooky electromagnetism, carrying the stories of people we would never meet. Without knowing what it meant to “log on,” our fellow citizens in 1926 were already learning what it means to never be able to log off.

V. The Future, According to 1926

The authors of Recent Social Trends were astonishingly prescient about the direction of technology. In one paragraph, they somehow anticipated the rise of audiobooks, YouTube, Netflix, smartphone cameras, musical software, ubiquitous air conditioning, and the electric battery revolution:

It may be that the world will find much use for talking books; school and college students may listen to lectures by long-running phonographs or talking pictures; moving pictures may be transmitted by wireless into houses; seeing with that new electric eye, the photo-electric cell, and recording what is seen, appear to have almost unlimited applications; new musical instruments different from any now in use may be given to us by electricity; the production of artificial climate may become widespread; an efficient storage battery of light weight and low cost might produce changes rivaling those of the internal combustion engine. And these are only a few of the myriad possibilities from new inventions in the future!

In an equally oracular section, the authors predicted the emergence of remote work and declining geographic mobility, anticipating that “the transmission of goods, of the voice and possibly of vision may act as a retarding influence on human mobility in the future and may cause a development of more remote and impersonal direction and controls.”

But the social scientists did not see these trends as altogether good. They worried that modern life, defined in equal parts by urbanization and technology, obliterated people’s values and their sense of self. Even as they gawked at the increase in patents—which grew more than 20-fold between the 1850s and the 1920s—they worried that a growing number of discoveries would bring “problems of morals, of education, of law, of leisure time, of unemployment, of speed, of uniformity and of differentiation.”

Social scientists of the 1920s saw machines pushing workers off of farms and competing with workers in manufacturing plants. How long, they wondered, until they would replace human workers in all tasks? “A larger proportion of work by machines, and a smaller proportion of human labor, is to be expected in the future,” they wrote. “There are indeed a few cases of wholly automatic factories and automatic stores and many automatic salesmen.” It is extraordinary to read these fears and not reflect on the AI jobs panic of the present, while also marveling at the thousands of occupations that are possible today precisely because machines made old jobs obsolete.

The dawn of the age of the machine drove us mad. Physicians of the day warned that the frail human mind was no match for the car, predicting at the time that “diseases of the wheel” would afflict the youth who rode bicycles and cars without restraint. It was not entirely obvious that they were wrong. In Germany, the number of patients registered in mental hospitals grew from 40,375 in 1870 to 220,881 in 1910. Over the same period, the share of patients admitted to general hospitals for illnesses of the nervous system rose from 44 to 60 percent.

Most perceptively, social critics of the age recognized that the urban-technological revolution of the early 20th century—what we might even call “modernity”—transformed not only our minds but also our values. Machines and systems that pulled Americans off the farm, away from the family home, and into churning markets of people and products threatened to replace the Judeo-Christian values that had bound the country for centuries with a new system of values dictated by markets. In 1903, the sociologist Georg Simmel anticipated the anxieties of the Twenties—ours and theirs—when he observed that in cities “money takes the place of all the manifoldness of things” and becomes “a common denominator of all values.” Money “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values, and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair.”

One hundred and twenty years after the publication of that essay, the Wall Street Journal asked thousands of Americans what values were still important to them. While a declining share of Americans endorsed the worthiness of patriotism, religion, community, and children, the share who said “money” was “very important to them” went up. It sometimes seems as if markets and money are the last value standing, the final common denominator beneath all human endeavor.

On its 250th birthday, the U.S. similarly defines itself through markets. Those famous words of Calvin Coolidge, America’s president in 1926, could just as well serve this American president and this American moment: “The chief business of the American people is business.”

The debate about the future of jobs and AI often polarizes into two extreme categories, neither of which I find particularly useful.

On one side, there are the Doomers. They predict that AI will destroy millions of jobs. Most notably, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has sometimes predicted an imminent entry-level white-collar wipeout. The problem with this theory is that it doesn’t really stand up to the current data. The employment rate for prime-age workers in the U.S. is near its all-time high, and a survey of corporate executives found “little evidence of near-term aggregate employment declines due to AI.” Practically every claim of AI’s strong effects on the labor force are highly contested among economists.

On the other side, there are the Deniers. They insist that AI is a scam, a stochastic parrot, and an overhyped category of vaporware. But while the Doomers too often live in a future that doesn’t exist, the Deniers too frequently dwell in a past that’s no longer with us. The generative AI economy, which barely existed four years ago, has now generated between $100 billion and $200 billion in total revenue in the last 12 months, and AI’s facility with coding has transformed the jobs of millions of software engineers.

Between doom and denial, there is the evidence. Through the mists of statistical confusion, a clearer picture of AI and the future of work is finally coming into view. AI doesn’t seem to be obliterating jobs so much as leading to the explosion of a very specific kind of work, which has major implications for the way we think about AI, the future of jobs, and how to get rich in America.

I. Matt’s Story

Matt Rosenberg left his job at Amazon in 2025. He wanted to open a restaurant in the East Bay with his Thai wife, whose family had served food in Bangkok for decades.

Hoping to buy a restaurant, Matt shared his plans with ChatGPT. He shared strategy documents, foot-traffic research, and videos of restaurant kitchens. One day, he said, ChatGPT suggested he look into “micro-enterprise home kitchens,” a little-known rule that allows families to sell food that they whip up at home. Soon, the couple opened a restaurant from their own kitchen called Bangkok Rush Thai Kitchen.

Restaurants can exist without AI; millions have. But Bangkok Rush Thai Kitchen might not. Matt and his wife have used AI to build their website, keep up with compliance, manage their inventory, and analyze customer trends. “Starting a business takes a lot out of you,” he told me. “Without ChatGPT, I think my wife and I might have given up early on in this process.”

Today, the Rosenbergs’ restaurant—whose most popular dishes include khanom krok, a small round coconut pancake—sells out of desserts so frequently that they’re looking to open a brick-and-mortar location. Flush with confidence, Matt has even started a second business: a one-man consultancy that teaches other people how to start a company using AI.1

II. The Rise of the Solo Act—and the Indie Millionaire

This is a golden age for solo acts. There has never been a better or easier time to work independently. And there has never been an easier time to become a millionaire by working for yourself.

I’m going to walk through this phenomenon step-by-step, and then I’ll tell you why it’s happening and whether I think it’s going to last:

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In February, the U.S. and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, striking hundreds of military targets and killing thousands of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, including Supreme Leader Khamenei. The White House and its defenders called their campaign a clear and unalloyed success, the latest display of a de…

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One year ago, I left The Atlantic, where I’d worked happily for nearly 17 years, to launch this Substack. This week, my newsletter turns one. So, I wanted to use its first birthday to reflect on the state of the business, what I’ve learned about writing a newsletter on this platform, and where I’m trying to grow in the ne…

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I. The Ring

In December 2024, I received an Oura ring for the holidays. I thought I would hate it.

I’d had a messy relationship with other “wearable” technology designed to monitor my physical activity, or lack thereof. Years earlier, during a period of elevated stress and miserable sleep quality, I’d owned a different fitness device that wouldn’t stop sending me panicked notifications about my insomnia. Sleep was hard enough without the harsh judgment of one’s jewelry, I thought. I threw the thing in the trash.

But the ring I liked. One of the first things I learned was how alcohol affected my sleep. When I had a glass of wine after 8 p.m., my resting heart rate shot up, and my heart rate variability plummeted. This would lower my “Readiness” score, which is prominently featured on the smartphone app. But when I had the same glass while cooking dinner around 5:30 p.m., the wine had no effect on my Readiness number. Like so many elderly Millennials, I am the sort of person who cannot see a prominently labeled scoreboard without devoting myself to climbing it. So, without ever figuring out what heart-rate variability actually meant, I ditched the late-night drinks. (Mostly.)

The demise of the nightcap wasn’t the only way the ring changed my life. More profoundly, it altered my relationship to activity. Before a walk, after a workout, or even after a nap, I would check in with the app to see my Readiness, Activity, and Sleep scores. Each day was now compared with—even set in competition against—the previous day or the previous week. The ring pulled me into a feedback loop with a biometric technology that turned my body into a game board through which I could win or lose points.

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who writes about the philosophy of games and metrics, has said that the modern world’s blizzard of numbers can obscure our wise yet murky questions about life and replace them with easy and legible goals. For example, someone might become a journalist to uncover important truths but then devote each week’s labor to maximizing page views; or she might get into philosophy to think about the deepest life questions but devote her life to maximizing her h-index. “Metrics are useful because they compress information,” Nguyen told me. “They are dangerous, because they compress information.”

At its best, the ring makes me fitter, happier, and, sure, even more productive. I walk more, lift more, sleep more, and drink less. You will be hard-pressed to find a physician who thinks there’s anything amiss in the previous sentence.

But the same doctor might not see how the obsession with winning the measurable games of health can encroach on the less measurable games of life. The best way to sleep more is to see fewer friends in the evening. The best way to lift more during the week is to eliminate social lunches to protect my midday gym time. To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating my less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness.

The ring improved my life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls me away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

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II. The Enhanced Self

Clearly, I am not the only American who is reconsidering his relationship with alcohol. The share of people who drink hit an all-time low last year, according to Gallup, whose data go back to 1939. Total beer consumption recently reached a 21st-century low, and wine vineyards are reportedly “in crisis.” While many social changes happen slowly, the attitude shift against alcohol has been quite sudden. The share of Americans who say moderate drinking (defined as one or two drinks a day) is “bad for health” doubled in just the last 10 years. Two-thirds of Americans under 35 now tell Gallup that alcohol is harmful in any quantity.

The decline of drinking is one part of a larger cultural phenomenon, a hydra-headed megatrend whose tentacles reach out to touch everything from science and medicine to technology and entertainment, reshaping the way that Americans think about themselves, their time, their friendships, and their future. It is the rise of the Enhanced Self.

The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides (injectables that affect inflammation and gut health and are also the “P” in GLP), and the continued growth of supplements. More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what is not wrong with them. At the layer of leisure, the tendrils of the Enhanced Self touch the white-hot rise of fitness in American life. A record 77 million Americans belonged to a gym or studio in 2024, up 20 percent since before the pandemic. Running clubs on the fitness app Strava nearly quadrupled in 2025 alone. If you don’t believe the industry data, perhaps you’ll believe the federal government: according to the American Time Use Survey, Americans today exercise and play sports more than at any period on record.

At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism. At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization, which I have previously called the anti-social century. While running clubs and morning workouts are booming—and I am positive that these are highly social events for at least some of their participants—nightclubs are closing and parties are withering. Young Americans spend about 35 percent less time socializing and 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the century.

America’s self-improvement tradition is practically as old as the country. Benjamin Franklin tracked thirteen virtues on a daily scorecard. Sylvester Graham preached dietary reform in the 1830s. The instinct to improve the body, and to moralize that improvement, is anciently American.

These earlier iterations of self-improvement drew their power from religion, community, or characterological projects to promote civic virtue. Temperance, for example, was not just about individual health; it was a social movement to improve the culture, to rescue women and children from alcoholic husbands, and to build a better republic. (That it failed in myriad ways is not to deny that some of its goals were virtuous.) The Muscular Christianity movement of the 19th century paired New Testament virtues with an ethic of manly strength in a way that wouldn’t be so out of step with modern MAGA and MAHA machismo.

But the age of the Enhanced Self is different, not only because many of its elements are distinctly of the 2020s—including peptide shots, social media, and biometric scanners—but also because it does not particularly seek to build anything outside of the self. For all its sins, the temperance movement was focused on national change. But the typical adherent to the Enhanced Self—say, a 50-year-old with a peptide stack and a Whoop—is not trying to improve the country. He’s just trying to improve his score.

The history of alcohol abstention offers another way to see how the Enhanced Self is a truly modern phenomenon. For a long time, abstinence was associated with religion or personal histories, such as addiction recovery or pregnancy. But in the new health culture, abstinence is not about faith or addiction; it is about bodily perfection. On health podcasts and videos, influencers and science communicators talk about alcohol’s association with sleep scores, skin clarity, energy levels, cardiometabolic biometrics, and executive function. The explosive growth of non-alcoholic breweries like Athletic Brewing offers commercial proof in a secular age that the decline of drinking has little to do with faith. Modern sobriety, for better or worse, is not about addiction, but enhancement; not about our body politic, but about our bodies—period.

III. The Three Pillars of the Enhanced Self

The Enhanced Self is defined by three distinct tendencies. None of these ideas are entirely new in the 2020s, but the combination of science, technology, and social media has afforded them special power.

1. OPTIMIZATION AS THE NEW VIRTUE: Many drugs and devices initially invented to cure the sick become instruments to greatly enhance the healthy.

In his book Outlive, which serves as a kind of Bible of self-enhancement, the scientist and podcaster Peter Attia divides the history of medicine into three phases. Medicine 1.0 was the prescientific era of doctors trying and mostly failing to treat disease. Medicine 2.0 is the modern approach, in which doctors cure illness with the full apparatus of science, including randomized drug trials. Medicine 3.0, Attia argues, goes further: it stops chronic illness before it takes hold, through personalized, data-driven preventative care.

This is the medical logic of the Enhanced Self, in which drugs and devices built to cure the sick become instruments to enhance the healthy. GLP-1s designed for diabetics now quiet food noise in millions of people who simply want to eat less. Continuous glucose monitors, originally designed for diabetics, have found a growing market among healthy people who want to know how an afternoon’s potato chip changes their blood sugar. Stacked on top, you have biohacking with off-label peptides1, experimentation with supplements, and hormone therapies, including replacement therapy. Prescriptions for TRT rose from 7.3 million in 2019 to more than 11 million in 2024, a 50 percent increase in five years, with an even steeper rise among men aged 35 to 44.2

Put it together—peptides, supplements, and hormone therapy, connected through the web of biometric data made available by fitness trackers—and today’s self-enhancers are armed with a portfolio of pharmacological and technological tools, allowing them to treat their bodies like improvable machines.

2. FITNESS AS THE NEW CLASS MARKER: We used to compare ourselves based on money. But fitness trackers and biomarkers create a parallel class system that makes us feel superior to, or inferior to, everybody else.

A generation ago, high-status Americans bragged about how little they slept, as a proxy for their work ethic. Today, the even-richer elite brag about how much they sleep, as a testament to their ability to outrun mortality. They toy with sleep stacks of magnesium and melatonin. They try mouth tape, white-noise-cancellation devices, and multithousand-dollar cooling mattresses. I have witnessed adults comparing deep-sleep percentages the way their younger selves once compared GPAs and SAT scores.

If you squint, it looks like health is becoming the new status marker and, perhaps, the ultimate status signal. For centuries, people compared themselves to others based on income, in part because money is standardized, measurable, and visible. If you earn $1,000,000 a year, and I earn $50,000 a year, then we both know where we stand relative to the other in purchasing power. Fitness comparison, by contrast, was more difficult, except in obvious cases of diagnosis (i.e., a neighbor who has cancer) and physical appearance (i.e., an extremely thin or heavy person in the office). But as fitness biomarkers and peptide stacks become part of upper-class conversation, people can more easily rank themselves against others, turning health into a comparative status marker.

Every cultural movement mints a new class of celebrity, and the Enhanced Self is no exception. Attia turned longevity medicine into a mainstream preoccupation. Andrew Huberman built a podcast empire on the premise that every behavior, from morning sunlight exposure to cold-water dips, could be neurochemically optimized. Bryan Johnson became the human embodiment of the movement’s extremes, spending millions of dollars a year submitting his body to hundreds of interventions in a war against aging.

What these figures sell, beyond supplements and programs, is the feeling of superiority along with an insider’s vocabulary: VO₂ max, grip strength, Zone 2 cardio, DEXA scans. These terms have migrated from exercise physiology textbooks into dinner-party conversation, giving ordinary people—or disproportionately affluent people—benchmarks for comparing themselves to others, as they think about their bodies as systems to be monitored and compared.

Once we see bodies as measurable and improvable systems over which we exert a certain amount of control, it is only a small step toward thinking of personal health as an enterprise that requires an almost managerial approach—that is, as yet another job.

3. HEALTH AS THE ULTIMATE JOB: More people are treating health maintenance as a kind of professional occupation, one that makes them behave like the chief executive of their own body.

The historian Alfred Chandler argued in The Visible Hand that the telegraph and the railroad moved information so fast that companies needed a new kind of person to handle it. They were called “managers,” and thus was managerial capitalism born.

Something similar is happening in modern health. The eruption of biometric data from wearable devices, along with the genetic and diagnostic tests that forecast our futures3, produces a flood of information that demands a managerial response. I find it almost impossible to look at my Oura ring without comparing this week’s heart rate and exercise data to last week’s. When I read one day’s numbers (huh, that exercise score looks awful), I feel obligated to adjust my behavior (I should schedule a walk). As more people manage this deluge of information flow, they will face the same problem as 19th century chain stores, and they will begin to think of their anatomical output as a product to be managed. Slowly and then quickly, many of them will come to see themselves as akin to chief executives of their own bodies.4

As strange as this might sound, I think the Self Executive will become an identifiable figure in the next few years. By this I mean: More people will talk about their health, their fitness, and their life extension procedures as if they were a job, a career, or a calling. In the process, they will somewhat invert the historical role of leisure in modern life. In the traditional arrangement, people go to the office, where they focus on being productive, and then go home and relax. But today, fitness and health fixations are colonizing leisure at the same time that our wearable devices gather, sort, and grade the data that our bodies produce. Over time, this trains people to approach their downtime with the very same productivity mindset that they were supposed to leave at the office. In short, the Enhanced Self turns personal health into a second job, one in which the individual serves as both the executive and the firm.

IV. Enhanced Selfishness

In one respect, the age of the Enhanced Self is a triumph. The fruits of this movement will include fitter people, with less disease, who live longer lives. This is not an achievement of mere accounting. It will mean millions of moms and dads who live to dance at their kids’ weddings. It will mean more friendships and partnerships that last into the 90s and beyond. It will mean children who know their grandparents by their touch and their smell and not just by their photographs.

As sure as I am that all health is good, I am skeptical that the Enhanced Self is a purely positive trend. The pursuit of health can go too far, and it can come at the expense of others. The three pillars of the Enhanced Self include optimization, class comparison, and running one’s body like a corporation. These are all individualist endeavors. Many of them are inherently solitary.

Many people have told me that the fitness boom is a direct response to declining social connection. For some, gyms and workout classes serve as the 21st century’s answer to shuttered union halls and molding bowling alleys. They are the new spaces where people, young and old, can go to seek out a social life, to talk to people, to attend events, and to become a member of a community.

But it is no coincidence that the age of the Enhanced Self is also an age of aloneness. Young people, who are seeing the highest increases in exercise time, also say they have fewer friends than any cohort ever; that they spend more time alone than any generation on record; and that they are more anxious and depressed than previous groups. Generation Z has the lowest levels of interpersonal trust of any group ever polled, the author and researcher Ryan Burge reported. “The velocity of their decline in trust already far exceeds any previous generation,” he wrote.

Our bodies want us to be social, even when we act like secular monks. Research by Sandra Weintraub of Northwestern University has found that “super-agers” (individuals over 80 with the cognitive function of people decades younger) shared little in common except for an unusually robust history of friendship and other social connections. A 2025 analysis of 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank reported that living with a partner and frequently visiting family had roughly the same relationship with longevity as exercise.

Our health is our own. It is one of those things that we cannot share with other people. And so, while the pursuit of health does not have to cleave us away from others, the project of delaying mortality is often a solitary undertaking.

V. Coda (Death)

Sometimes, I wonder what the Enhanced Self is all about. Surely, its emergence in American life has something to do with a traumatic pandemic winding down, the rise of the MAHA movement, and the migration of Nietzschean tech executives toward the center stage of internet culture, just as GLP-1s and new fitness trackers made certain kinds of self-improvement reachable for millions. Altogether, I think these forces have, like disconnected weather systems moving into a shared area, created a cyclone of a social phenomenon.

But deeper forces may be at work. In a sensationoal essay, the psychologist Adam Mastroianni notes that over the past few decades, high schoolers have steadily drunk less, smoked less, and fought less. In the same period, serial killers have all but vanished, blockbusters have grown less original, design has grown less distinctive, and cars have gone monochrome. Mastroianni ties these together with a theory he calls “the decline of deviance.” As people get richer and the world gets safer, deviance falls, because “life is worth more now.” When people think that they might live to be 100, the strategy for every life-game is the same: play it safe.

The novelist Karl Ove Knausgård once wrote that an irony of the modern world is that we are obsessed with cultural representations of death and yet terrified of the real thing. In movies and TV shows and podcasts and news, people are constantly dying; dead bodies are the hydrocarbons that power every modern plot. But no amount of represented death can prepare us for the thing itself. When bodies die in real life, we rush to hide them. In the hospital, they are filed away in subterranean basements, at the far end of long hallways that branch out like root systems, where no visitor can accidentally stumble upon them. Enraptured by death’s fiction, we are also terrified of its reality.

At bottom, enhancement culture is a disposition toward death—thinking about death, calculating distance from death, worshipping death like some Aztec priest offering sacrifices to appease the angry sun god. Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and company-and-book-inspired Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives. But when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic—how much time will this drink cost me? how much time will that supplement buy me?—many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

The fact that the Enhanced Self is often anti-social and the fact that it’s profoundly about death are not two different claims but rather two reflections of the same idea. Our fear of death motivates an all-consuming neuroticism about outrunning mortality, even when the price we pay is putting health optimization above everything else, including other people.

Last week, wrecked from travel, I saw a friend whom I hadn’t seen in months for drinks in Washington, D.C., on a Thursday. We had many things to celebrate—birthdays, babies—and oh how we celebrated. We stayed up too late. I drank too much. My head hit the pillow several hours after bedtime, and when I woke up, the mezcal left a dull ache behind my left eye. Turning toward my nightstand, I saw my Oura ring, which I’d taken off before slipping into bed. Data from the previous night’s sub-optimal sleep, like light particles within a black hole, would never reach the outside world. Thank god for that. I put the ring back on my finger, and I walked downstairs to make coffee. I don’t remember when the hangover ended. Was it one minute, one hour, a day? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I saw my friend. He saw me, too. In more ways than one, we lived.

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I. The Aurelius Trap

Consider the stories of three leaders, each considered peerless in his domain.

1. Rome

Only “once in the history of the world,” Alice Zimmern wrote, has a man fulfilled Plato’s vision of a philosopher-king, a world-class ruler who was also a peerless mind. He was Marcus Aurelius.

As emperor of Rome in the second century CE, Aurelius moonlit as a dispenser of aphoristic gems about life, death, and honor. His private journal, now known as his Meditations, is a compendium of notes-to-self, maxims, and Stoic writings, which Aurelius composed while planning and carrying out a military campaign in Europe. Never intended for broad publication, the book has nonetheless become one of the most-published works of philosophy in history. It is hard to think of a person more powerful in his life whose words have been read so frequently in his afterlife.

One might expect such a person to be a paragon of good judgment. But rather than select a proven statesman to lead the fragile empire—as many good emperors of the previous century had done—Aurelius elevated his troubled biological son, Commodus. In the view of Edward Gibbon, the historian who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Commodus’ reign was the beginning of the end for Rome. Lazy, vain, and self-indulgent, Commodus allowed corruption to fester and order to crumble. “The monstrous vices of the son,” Gibbon wrote, “have cast a shade on the purity of the father’s motives”, as Aurelius “sacrificed the happiness of millions to a fond partiality for a worthless boy.”

I sometimes think about the thousands of executives and entrepreneurs who read Meditations over and over and fail to absorb the lesson buried in its biographical introduction. In the privacy of his tents and chambers, Marcus Aurelius articulated the virtues of judgment as well as anyone. But when it came to the most significant judgment of his own life, Aurelius handed off his kingdom to a nincompoop whose reign accelerated the demise of the Roman Empire.

When, you might think, has a leader so wise ever proven so incompetent at that most essential job: Naming a successor who doesn’t threaten to destroy his legacy?

2. Hollywood

When Bob Iger stepped down as CEO of The Walt Disney Company for the first time, in early 2020, he was coming off one of the greatest runs in modern corporate history. Unlike Aurelius, Iger did not inherit an empire at its peak. In 2005, Disney’s animation studio was a mess, its feature films struggled at the box office, and theme-park attendance had flattened after the post-9/11 slump.

Between 2005 and 2020, Iger went on a triumphant shopping spree, bagging Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Just when Disney’s trunk seemed so stuffed with intellectual property that surely nothing more could fit, he managed to squeeze in the voluminous assets of 21st Century Fox. Throughout the 2010s, Disney pumped out billion-dollar hit after hit, plumbing its unrivaled library of titles for sequels, prequels, adaptations, and reboots that dominated the box office and rewrote the rules of Hollywood.

With the stock at all-time highs, Iger finally named a successor: Bob Chapek, the head of Disney’s theme park division. The results were dismal.

Chapek’s failures, which coincided with the pandemic, extended from box office disappointments to a political mess over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But the failure of Bob II reflected as poorly on Bob I. As the New York Times reported, Iger repeatedly “undermined” his successor and failed to build a credible runway, leaving Chapek weakened, the board unsettled, and Disney without a clear “next chapter.”1

In 2022, Iger returned to the company weakened in part by his own botched succession planning, like a doctor heading back into the O.R. to staunch the bleeding from a wound he helped to inflict. Thus did the smoothest executive in showbiz oversee one of the industry’s most turbulent and least successful corporate handoffs.

3. New England

Bill Belichick is the greatest coach in NFL history. In a league whose rules are designed to promote parity and break up dynasties, Belichick coached Tom Brady and the New England Patriots to the most-ever wins in a 10-year period; the most-ever consecutive conference championship appearances; the most consecutive division titles; and the most Super Bowl wins (six, which is tied with the Pittsburgh Steelers, but accomplished in one continuous tenure rather than over a half century).

But the same man whose fussy mastery of football made him an infamous pain in the ass was significantly less masterful in charting the end of his career. In early 2024, the Patriots elevated Jerod Mayo—then a young linebackers coach and former Patriots player—to head coach, positioning him as Belichick’s successor. The promise of continuity was central. Mayo had grown up in the organization and had Belichick’s blessing; owner Robert Kraft later revealed that Mayo had been identified for the job years in advance, according to Bleacher Report. But the parts of the succession puzzle that matter most—a clear timeline, the transition of authority, and preparation for leadership—were left fuzzy.

The experiment failed almost immediately. Mayo’s first season ended in a 4-13 record, and the team finished last in its division. The board and Kraft pulled the plug on Mayo after just one season, publicly admitting that they had put him in an “untenable situation.” As if to punctuate the awfulness of the initial succession planning, the Patriots made the Super Bowl the very next year under a different head coach. Jerod Mayo is currently not employed by any NFL team.

***

“The major job of leaders is to develop other leaders,” the management expert Noel Tichy once wrote. But corporate and political history is full of towering figures who gave way to fools and incompetents.

Call it the Aurelius Trap. Strong leaders often fail to do the most important thing in leadership, which is to plan for a successor who can extend their time-bound term into a longer legacy. They have a tendency to make themselves indispensable and irreplaceable—and then prove themselves right by handing the reins to a leader who fails to replace them.

The question of why it is so hard for great leaders to finish the job is interesting enough that it does not require a news peg. But its significance will only grow in the next few years, given the advanced age of modern American leadership. As the Yale professor Samuel Moyn writes in his new book Gerontocracy in America, the political and business worlds are older than ever. In the S&P 500, chief executives are ten-times more likely to be over 70 years old than under 40. Boomers have so dominated American politics that we’ve had more presidents born in the summer of 1946 (three: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump) than in all the years after 1946 (one: Barack Obama, born 1961). Our last two presidents have been the two oldest in American history.

A successful handoff from one generation to the next is self-evidently critical in politics. In business, it’s a nine-figure decision. A 2021 study found that the market value wiped out by “badly managed CEO and C-suite transitions” across the largest publicly traded companies was close to 20 percent of annual investor gains. By this measure, the question of why succession planning so often goes wrong is worth, literally, trillions of dollars.

In the reporting for this essay, I read dozens of papers and consulted several leadership researchers. In my best effort to synthesize the wisdom of these resources, I’ve boiled down this literature to four big theories about why great leaders are so bad at what might be their most important job. While no simple summary of their findings can fit inside of one sentence, the best I can offer is this two-sentence summary:

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There are two problems with the famous “male loneliness crisis”—the loneliness part and the male thing.

First, it’s not clear that loneliness is rising. The most careful studies show only a small increase in self-reported loneliness in the last few years, despite the significant increase in alone time among all Americans, especially young and low-income people.

Second, there’s little evidence that men feel particularly lonely. One study by the American Institute for Boys and Men found that women are just as, or more, likely to say they feel lonely “frequently” or “always.” Other studies mostly find the same:

A separate survey from The Argument of more than 4,5000 people found that women consistently said they felt lonely more than men. More than gender, youth was a far better predictor of emotional distress and feelings of social isolation.

What do we make of this ostensible myth of the male loneliness crisis? One interpretation is that there is nothing to worry about, and everybody is fine.

The trouble with that interpretation, however, is the fact that everybody is so evidently not fine. In the last few years, rates of anxiety and depression among young people have set records. Several surveys—including the General Social Survey and the World Happiness Report—have shown US well-being in a ditch. Other surveys that measure Americans’ feelings about the economy (see: the University of Michigan Consumer Survey) and the country (see: Pew Research) indicate an unprecedented level of national gloom.

This all sets up one of my deepest-held hot takes about the state of the country: The problem isn’t that Americans feel lonely; the problem is that too many Americans, who are spending more time alone than ever, do not feel lonely enough.

Loneliness can be thought of as a biological cue to spend time with other people. But many Americans, enraptured by television and televisual media on every screen, are ignoring that ancient signal. They’ve withdrawn from the world of flesh-and-blood friends and replaced them with pixel-and-glass representations. Thus have beds and couches replaced bedrock communities and parasocial life has eclipsed social life.

The number of Americans who say they have six or more friends has declined by about 60 percent in the last few decades, while the share of Americans who say they have no friends has surged. In both cases, it’s men who have lost the most. No, the problem isn’t that men are lonely. The problem is that many men wouldn’t recognize loneliness if it punched them in the gut and poured a beer on their head.

Laurie Santos is a Yale professor of happiness and the host of the podcast The Happiness Lab. In today’s interview, we talk about:

• whether men are worse at making and keeping friends than women

• how modern notions of loneliness and masculinity both emerged from the 19th century

• when solitude is good and when aloneness is bad

• how to talk to people—and the upsides of over-sharing

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Are Men Worse at Friendship?

Derek Thompson: Do you think that men are worse than women at maintaining friendships in adulthood?

Laurie Santos: I think there’s lots of evidence to show that they are. I don’t think this is something deep-seated and biological about being a guy, but if you look at the data, men are doing worse in the friendship department. And we have to couch this in what’s happening generally, which is that over time, everybody’s friendships are going down. If you look at American Time Use Survey data, which has been studying people for decades, pretty much everybody across all age groups and both genders is spending less time in person with their friends than they did a few decades ago.

But that decrease is much worse for men. One study found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship -- do you have six close friends you could talk to? -- men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. And if you ask how many men say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15% of American guys in midlife saying exactly that. That’s a fivefold decrease since folks have been running this survey.

Thompson: Let’s get into why. There is an overall structural trend toward aloneness and away from sociality, which I’ve called the antisocial century. But I want to narrow in on why this has been particularly isolating for men. I remember a conversation with Richard Reeves where he said women and even children are more likely to hang out face-to-face, but adult men are more likely to hang out in what he called shoulder-to-shoulder contexts. They require a centralizing activity to provide an excuse for hanging out. Let’s play golf, let’s watch the game, let’s go to the bar. Women are more likely to meet up in contexts that don’t need an excuse. Men need that excuse—video games, sports—which might mean it’s harder for them to come up with a reason to hang out in the first place.

Santos: The face-to-face versus shoulder-to-shoulder distinction is really important. Todd Rogers, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, did a study where he went to the American Time Use Survey—which looks at how people spend their time, whether they’re eating, cooking, shopping, playing video games—and he asked men and women how likely they’d be to invite somebody to do each of those things. For women, it was most categories: “Yeah, I could invite somebody to go shopping, sit and have coffee, come over while I’m cooking.” For guys, it was basically watch sports or do sports. His idea is that it just doesn’t seem culturally acceptable for guys to invite other guys to do the things that time-use surveys show we actually spend most of our time doing. The categories that guys feel okay inviting other guys into are much smaller.

But the deeper question is why it’s so hard for guys to get together and chat face-to-face. And I think this comes back to traditional gender norms—not all guys, there’s lots of heterogeneity here—but more guys grow up with norms around independence, self-reliance, stoicism, not talking about emotions. That makes it hard to have the vulnerable face-to-face conversations that a lot of guys seem to avoid. And these are relatively new values. If you rewind to classical Greece, you find Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, and they are literal warrior dudes who openly wept when a friend died. If you look at early American history, you find our forefathers walking hand in hand, writing effusive poetry to one another. These norms were not always there.

Thompson: When do you think this conception of masculinity and friendship changed?

Santos: It seems like a lot of it changed in the late 19th century, for a couple of reasons. One is real differences in how people were conceptualizing gender. Back in the 1700s, the idea was that men were actually more empathic than women; women were thought not to have the requisite emotions for close friendship. That changes around the 19th century, when women become the caretakers, the providers. There was also more awareness of queer culture at that time, and because that identity was stigmatized, it caused straight men to become more paranoid about closeness with other men. Then into the early 20th century you get the traditional male gender norms everywhere were coalescing. Through the 18th and early 19th century, guys could be friends, openly expressing emotions. Then that changed.

Thompson: That reminds me of the history book Battle Cry of Freedom, whose opening chapter argues that in the 1850s and 1860s, the Industrial Revolution was sending men out of subsistence farming and into a new mechanized economy, where they became seen as being in charge of work. Women became guardians of the home. You had those separate spheres of influence, which had knock-on effects for what it meant to be modernly masculine versus feminine.

Santos: And we see the knock-on effects today. I interviewed the actor Andrew McCarthy, who wrote a book about the history of male friendship after realizing in his own midlife that he’d lost his friends. He went on a road trip to reconnect with old friends and talk with men around the country about their notions of friendship. One thing that struck him was that everybody he talked to, from Texas oil rig workers to guys in cities, talked about the pressure to provide as a key obstacle to male friendship in midlife. That pressure was central to why men just weren’t making time for social connection.

The myths of the male loneliness crisis

Thompson: The decline in male friendships is sometimes called the “male loneliness crisis.” But the evidence that loneliness itself is surging among men is not nearly as clear as the fact that aloneness is surging. You make the additional point that loneliness is subjective—someone can spend a week at a silent retreat and feel incredibly happy; another person can spend 12 hours alone and feel crushing loneliness—and intensely modern. Tell me how you think we misunderstand loneliness.

Santos: I talked to a historian named Fay Bound Alberti, who has a book on the history of loneliness. She argues that loneliness as we think about it today is actually a pretty new phenomenon. People often talked about being alone, but there were lots of benefits to it : spiritual connection, getting to know yourself, emotion regulation. And for most of human history, there was a sense that you were never truly alone; God was around, or you were one with nature. She argues that our modern notion of loneliness is essentially a 19th century concept that emerged as culture became more secular and more individualist.

She contrasts Robinson Crusoe, from the early 1800s, with the Tom Hanks film “Cast Away.” In Robinson Crusoe, being stranded was a moment of spiritual enlightenment, a chance to find yourself. In Cast Away, the whole point is that Hanks went crazy because he had no one to talk to. There’s a real difference in what we think alone time does.

That’s where psychologists have started asking whether our construal of loneliness is actually creating the feelings associated with it. Researcher Micaela Rodriguez has been studying whether talking about the loneliness crisis makes people more lonely. She runs studies where some people read a typical news article about the loneliness crisis and others read about the benefits of solitude. That simple intervention changes how people experience being alone. Your perception of how bad it is to be alone is making loneliness worse when you actually find yourself alone.

Thompson: When do you think aloneness is therapeutic versus clinically harmful?

Santos: Part of it is intention and choice. How we feel about being alone or with other people might be very different from whether we’re actually alone or with other people. Some of my deepest moments of loneliness have been at a party where I felt disconnected, physically surrounded by people but experiencing real loneliness. Versus a silent meditation where you feel transcendently connected to something larger than yourself. So being physically alone or with other people doesn’t map cleanly onto whether you feel connected. But how we think about it matters enormously. If you’re excited to be alone, if you frame it as solitude rather than aloneness, research shows even those linguistic choices make a difference.

Thompson: Here’s a take you might push back on. A lot of people now spend historically high amounts of time alone, but surveys show they don’t report being lonely. When I see the decline of friendships, of coupling, of time spent with other people, I think they should be lonelier. If they felt a little lonelier, they would socialize more, get off their couch, make friends. Strong social connections are physically and neurologically protective as we get older, and they pay dividends. My thesis is that people are alone because they’re so deluged with entertainment that it’s overwhelming their impulse to be around other people. They’re not feeling lonely in the moment, so they’re not making that next friend. And then 20 or 30 years later, we find out that friendships have declined.

Santos: I don’t think that’s a hot take, because I agree with you. Micaela’s point is specifically that one of the reasons alone time can feel so bad—when people are truly isolated and not entertaining themselves but feeling the weight of it—is how they construe it. Her move is to say: let’s make alone time healthier by changing how we think about it. Her move is not to say: never have social connection.

I think both of us would agree there’s a real problem with how much time people are spending alone compared to 10 or 15 years ago. And I think we saw signs of this even earlier. Think of Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” where he looked at how in the 1950s people joined bowling leagues and had politically and ethnically diverse communities. Then in the late 90s and early 2000s, people weren’t bowling in leagues anymore. And Putnam was already writing this before the internet, before streaming. He was worried about television. And his critics said, “You’re totally underrating the internet. It’s going to transform socialization and bring everyone back together.” Two decades later, socialization has declined further, and the share of people under 25 who say they go to or host parties has declined by 70%. Putnam was prescient and his critics were not.

Thompson: A theme we keep circling: chosen aloneness can be sacred. Aloneness you fall into chronically is what’s harmful. As the father of two young kids, when I’m traveling and I get breakfast alone at a nice hotel, it’s genuinely the most incredible thing in the world, not because I hate my family, but because it’s purposeful aloneness, a brief and bounded ritual before I go back into the chaos of a loud and loving family. Of course aloneness can be therapeutic. But practically every therapeutic molecule can be overdosed. And people can fall into an overdose of aloneness without realizing they’re slowly depriving themselves of the friendships that would pay dividends 20 years down the line.

Santos: That’s exactly right. And someone like Micaela would add that culture can make it harder to get to that Zen-like moment of aloneness. If you’re eating that hotel breakfast thinking, “I’m alone, I must be a freak, something is wrong with me,” it’s very hard to enjoy it. She’s part of a generation that is much more alone than previous ones, and she remembers sitting in a dining hall in college not thinking, “Great, a moment to myself.” She was thinking, “I’m a freak. I don’t have any friends.” What we want is to find healthier ways to have alone time—and that may actually improve our social connection time. When you get that moment alone with your eggs, you come home refreshed. You can be a better partner, a better parent. Healthy alone time can give you the bandwidth to do the sometimes effortful work of building good social connection.

TMI vs. TLI (Too Much Information vs. Too Little Information)

Thompson: You’ve spoken to the University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley, who has done a lot of work on the counterintuitive psychology of connection. Tell me what you’ve learned about how we get this wrong.

Santos: One thing we get wrong about oversharing and TMI is that we often think about it in the context of social media : posting too much, blasting something about your boss on Facebook. And that makes us assume the same cringe judgment applies in real life. But what Nick studies, along with psychologists like Leslie John, shows that sharing more than you think is comfortable in real life is actually good.

Leslie John has been pushing the acronym TLI [Too Little Information] over TMI [Too Much Information]. Her idea is that not sharing enough quietly reshapes your life. If you don’t tell your colleagues about a disability, they can’t give you the help you need. If you don’t tell your partner about the small things needling you, those micro-frustrations add up. Being vulnerable is the path to true connection.

What Nick’s research shows is that people don’t react as negatively as you think when you share something. We worry about how competently others will view us when we reveal a struggle: “Will people think I’m a bad mom? Will they think I’m not good at my job?” But other people aren’t thinking about competence. They’re thinking about your warmth. They’re thinking, “This person shared something with me. They trust me.” And how do you react when someone shares something vulnerable? You tend to reciprocate warmth and openness. But we forget this when we’re the one doing the revealing, and so we share too little.

Thompson: One of my favorite stories from Nick is that he loves to get incoming students at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business into an auditorium and ask them to turn to the person closest to them and share their deepest fears or disappointments. Initially these students start writhing with discomfort. And he says, “We’re doing this.” Fifteen minutes later, he cannot get them to shut up. There are tears streaming down faces. The conclusion he’s driving at is that there’s a latent desire to share that often goes un-acted on because of a kind of social anxiety, a fear that revealing something true about ourselves will trigger judgment. When instead what tends to happen is reciprocity: vulnerability begets vulnerability, kindness, empathy.

What does this tell us about modern psychology? Are we demanding too much of ourselves to be introverted? Do we fear sharing more than we should?

Santos: It shows something I talk about constantly: our minds lie to us. We pursue happiness and social connection incorrectly because we have bad theories about what will make us feel good. Nick’s work shows we’re just bad at understanding the consequences of social connection. We’re bad at predicting how much people like us. We’re bad at thinking about what expressing something vulnerable will do to how we’re judged. And each one of these mistaken theories is preventing connections that would genuinely improve our lives.

One of my favorites is the Liking Gap, from psychologist Erica Boothby. When you ask “how much is this person going to like me after our conversation?” you consistently underestimate the answer. If you look at college roommates or new office hires and ask them how much the people around them like them, they consistently underestimate it.

Beautiful Mess Effect

Thompson: I think social media makes this much worse. Social media is so good at making in-group versus out-group messaging go viral that we can easily mistake the virality of online hostility for the way people relate in the physical world. But these are two completely different worlds with almost different rules. Online, outgroup hatred is a key to virality. In person, reciprocity tends to dictate relationships. If you’re nice to someone on a bus, they don’t say “go to hell.” You get what you give. It’s very hard for people who spend a lot of time on TikTok or Twitter, absorbing the popularity of hostile messaging, to then imagine meeting those same strangers in real life. And many times you don’t even meet them -- you just respond to a critic online and they say, “Oh my God, I love your work.” The moment people can see each other and know they’re being seen, the entire calculus of interpersonal psychology changes.

Santos: Nick makes a related point that doesn’t even require social media polarization. For most of human history, the only way to communicate was face-to-face in real time. Now we have texts, emails, Slack. And one of the things we know psychologically is that text dehumanizes us. It’s very hard to see a full mind in it, because you don’t get the emotional expression you get in person or even on a podcast. This is why you can’t tell if a text message is sarcastic or sincere. And if you think about how much of the human species now connects in text and text-like media, it makes sense that we’re misreading each other constantly.

The second bias I love is what’s called the Beautiful Mess Effect. We think that if we show our vulnerabilities or mess-ups at work or with friends, people will be put off. But what actually happens is that people like us more -- we seem human, more relatable, more like them. Sharing your mess signals trust and invites people to help. So we walk around with an incorrect theory that being vulnerable will make us less likeable, when in fact it makes us more so.

Naming these biases helps. When I’m on the verge of sharing something vulnerable or striking up a conversation with a stranger, I notice the cringe voice saying “don’t do it.” And I’ve developed some evidence-based courage to tell that voice: the data says you’re probably wrong by about 50%.

The Founders’ theory of happiness

Thompson: As Americans, the pursuit of happiness is inscribed into our founding document. But a theme of this episode is that many modern notions -- of male loneliness, of friendship, of what it means to be alone -- are recent inventions. In this 250th year of America, what did “the pursuit of happiness” mean in 1776 versus what we think it means in 2026?

Santos: As you might guess, we’re pretty off. Darrin McMahon, a historian at Dartmouth, has a book called “Happiness: A History” where he looks at this across time. For most of human history, you didn’t think you could pursue happiness, because it came down to luck. Even the word “happiness” comes from “hap” -- happenstance. Then in classical times, Aristotle and the Greeks started to think happiness was achievable, but the way to pursue it wasn’t to go after pleasure -- it was to pursue virtue. Courage, prudence, kindness. What Aristotle called eudaimonia: a life of flourishing. Happiness wasn’t about your own hedonic pleasure.

This changes in the 18th century, around the founding of the United States, for several reasons. Pestilence and disease were receding. Little creature comforts -- better bedding, lighting, chimneys -- were more available. Religious notions shifted away from Calvinist misery-now-happiness-later toward the idea that hedonic pleasure was compatible with a good life. So this is the world in which the founding fathers were operating: the first era in which pleasure was considered genuinely acceptable to pursue. But these were also scholars steeped in classical thought. Darrin McMahon’s idea is that they held a dual notion of happiness -- hedonic pleasure, yes, but achieved through virtue and through seeking happiness for the community, not just for yourself.

Interestingly, the word “pursuit” meant something different in the 18th century. It was connected to prosecution -- the hunt -- with the understanding that in going after happiness, you might kill it. So the preamble gives us an unalienable right to life and liberty, but happiness? You just have the right to pursue it. Implicit in that was the idea that it wasn’t guaranteed. And the work of pursuing it was the classical work of cultivating virtue.

Fast-forward to 2026 and you look at looksmaxxing and TikTok influencers and self-help culture and you think: we got way off track. We forgot the virtue part and we forgot that it wasn’t guaranteed to us.

Thompson: One conclusion I take from that story is that the Aristotelian concept of happiness that may have inspired Jefferson had this patina of virtue that is inherently social -- you are courageous not for yourself but for others. But when I think about looksmaxxing or “good vibes only” culture, it’s entirely an internal monitoring system: “Am I happy now? Is this a good vibe?” That’s a pull inward rather than an extension outward toward other people.

Santos: And two things go wrong when we do that. Psychologist Iris Mauss at UC Berkeley studied what she calls the paradox of happiness: the more we pursue it, the less happy we tend to be. One reason is that people who think of happiness as something social -- cultivating everyone’s flourishing -- are not as subject to hedonic adaptation. We get used to pleasures, we return to baseline. But if you’re pursuing kindness and generosity rather than hedonic pleasure, we’re less subject to that adaptation. The pitfalls of pursuing happiness don’t come up as much if you pursue it in this eudaimonic, social way.

The other pitfall is what psychologists call meta emotions -- emotions about emotions. When we constantly ask “am I happy yet?”, we often feel we come up short, and then comes the frustration, the shame, the “I should be doing better.” That makes us feel worse. The paradox is that the more we chase happiness in this individualist, self-monitoring way, the further we get from it. And the more we’ve strayed from the founders’ notion that happiness is about other people, social connection, and these social goods -- the worse we’ve made the very self we were trying to satisfy.

Thompson: It also seems that when we help other people, we can know that we’ve helped them in a way that we can’t always know that we’ve made ourselves happy. Self-happiness is a difficult endpoint to measure. Was I happy at that restaurant? Was that wine good enough? But if I shared that wine with my wife and we spoke lovingly about our kids -- those things have clear yes or no answers. You did it or you didn’t. But when you’re doing something purely to make yourself happy, the endpoint is impossible to truly know.

Santos: Yes. And we just tend to have fewer of those judgy meta emotions when it’s about other people. If you gift a friend a bottle of wine, you’re not agonizing over whether it was the right choice the way you might if you’d bought it for yourself. We have these built-in mechanisms for the warm glow of doing something for others that are just less prone to self-criticism. We are built to be connected. And the more we get away from connection, we do that at peril -- not just for our sense of belonging, but for our overall pursuit of happiness.

A very brief history of AI—and, by extension, the debate over whether it is a bubble—might go something like this:

1. The age of scaling and praying (Q4 2022 - 2025): After ChatGPT swept across the internet, hyperscalers poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. Despite enormous hopes for the technology, actual AI revenue lagged spending. There was a strong case that supply was outrunning demand, just as it does in every industrial bubble.

2. The age of agents (End of 2025 - ???): With the arrival of Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and other autonomous agents, corporate spending on AI went so berserk that Anthropic's servers started buckling under the load. Suddenly, the story flipped: Demand for AI was demonstrably outstripping the supply of compute, complicating the traditional bubble narrative.

3. The reality check (circa Q2 2026): After months of running up token bills in the millions of dollars, some companies started wondering whether the productivity gains from autonomous agents actually justified the cost. The question shifted from “Can AI generate demand?” to “Can AI backfill supply?” to “Hold on a sec, what are we spending all this money on?”

Thus, the center of gravity of the AI discourse has shifted from concerns about demand, to worries about supply, to a freakout over value. In the last few days, several executives of Fortune 500 companies have confided to reporters that they’ve been out spending on AI tokens like drunk gambling addicts slumped over at the Bellagio craps table. An AI consultant told Axios that one of its clients spent half a billion dollars in one month on Claude. That is roughly what the entire US population spends monthly on shampoo or contact lenses. Uber and Microsoft have reportedly discontinued some of their Claude Code licenses, as costs became unmanageable and productivity proved elusive. AI critics and bubble watchers are circling the news and claiming that this is the backlash that could take down the industry. Gary Marcus, the cognitive scientist who has been warning about AI since ChatGPT launched, wrote this week that “if enough other companies report the same [productivity disappointments], the bubble pops.”

So, what has happened here? And what level of a crisis is this for the trillion-dollar bet that the US economy has made on AI?

It’s worth backing up a half-step to recall how we arrived at this point. The shift from chatbots to agents that took place over the last six months is the central economic event in AI. No matter what story you’re trying to understand—whether it’s the surge in AI use at white-collar companies; the unprecedented increase in AI revenue at frontier labs, such as Anthropic; the degrading of Claude for some Anthropic customers; or even the stock boom in memory chips—everything comes back to the age of agents.

Compared to O.G. tools like ChatGPT, agents are practically another species of technology. While chatbots take one question and give one answer, an agent runs a loop: planning, calling up tools, retrieving results, updating context, and planning again. While this ability to loop back makes agents useful for complicated tasks, such as coding or complex data analysis, every step of every loop burns tokens, or units of computation. Add up all the steps, and you’ll find that agents eat tokens like mammals breathe oxygen. According to data from SemiAnalysis, the typical agent job uses 96,000 tokens before generating an answer, which is more text than the entire novel “The Great Gatsby.”

This explosion of token consumption has several consequences. First, tokens are money, and agents that use a lot of tokens owe a lot of money. The average business is spending 13x more on AI tokens than in January 2025,” said Ara Khazarian, the lead economist at Ramp. At several firms, AI agent spending quickly ran into the tens of millions of dollars—in many cases, more than the team of talented software engineers that some people feared that this technology would replace.

Second, to justify their surging token spending, companies initially conflated AI use and productivity. Firms such as Meta created internal leaderboards that ranked employees by token consumption, which encouraged workers to spend all day throwing projects at agentic AI without regard for efficiency, a practice dubbed “tokenmaxxing.” As token costs soared, the benefits from tokenmaxxing lagged. In many cases, it probably resulted in more work and more burnout for many teams. The engineering analytics firm Faros AI found that “code churn,” or lines of code deleted versus added, increased by more than 800 percent under high AI adoption.

Bubble watchers insist that this burnout and backlash could bring the AI spending boom crashing down to earth. And, since I have no special access to the future, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider the possibility that they’re right. If agentic AI is broadly seen as a waste of money by the major Fortune 500 clients, the great revenue surge of 2026 will slow down and add to the already significant doubt that the hyperscalers can make back the money that they’re outlaying on chips, data centers, electricity, and AI engineers.

Rather than see the agent backlash as a clear sign that AI is a scam, or that it is doomed, it might make more sense to see this development in the context of a normal technological adoption curve. As Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, has said, chief executives who valorized AI without understanding it were also subject to a special kind of AI psychosis—that is, the belief, disconnected from reality, that more AI is always better; that every line of code produced by agentic AI was ready to ship; and that each prototype that Claude Code spits out was another billion-dollar idea.

As SemiAnalysis’s Doug O’Laughlin told me in an interview last week, every new technology requires an extended period of trial and error, as organizations toggle between (a) not enough experimentation or spending, followed by (b) too much experimentation and spending, followed by (c) too dramatic a pullback, followed by (d) the repetition of steps (a) through (c), until firms figure out a long-term balance between labor spending and tech spending. Whether AI skeptics like Marcus are right that the bubble is about to pop depends entirely on a question that, as of today, nobody can definitively answer: Is the bill worth it?

This is just one of the questions that I put to O’Laughlin in a recent interview. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. Among other things we talk about:

• The panic over AI costs and its historical echoes

• The state of the AI-bubble debate

• The business lesson behind Anthropic’s historic success—what whether the company would already be doing $100 billion in annual revenue if it weren’t constrained by compute

• Whether OpenAI is doomed to get boxed in by Anthropic’s enterprise business and Google’s consumer access

• Why agents are to AI what the website was the internet

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The AI Cost Panic

Derek Thompson: Everybody is freaking out about AI agent costs right now. JPMorgan recently published a note entitled “Al Token Costs are Eating Internet Profits Alive.” Several companies, including Shopify, Spotify, ServiceNow, and Roku said in their recent earnings calls that AI is surging as a share of operating expenditures. Now we hear that Uber and Microsoft have blown through their 2026 token budgets in a matter of months, and some of these companies are reportedly dropping their Claude contracts. Where is this heading?

Doug O’Laughlin: I want to take the historical view.

Before the Industrial Revolution, for a lot of companies, all costs were labor costs. Over time, with the rise of machines, companies had to think about capital equipment being a permanent part of the cost of doing business. Now we’re seeing the beginning of a new operating cost. Let’s call it automated intelligence. Even if labor isn’t displaced, this category of automated intelligence is going to be a permanent part of the picture, much the same way that traditional IT didn’t exist 100 years ago and now every company factors it into their operating expenses.

While automated intelligence seems incredibly expensive today, it’s going to make sense for many companies to spend a lot of money on agentic AI in the long run. The challenge will be figuring out the right ratio of labor costs to AI costs. Today there are no benchmarks. Everybody is trying to figure it out on the fly. But despite the news stories, I’d argue that numbers that seem big today might seem small tomorrow. Everyone is going to figure out the effective ratio of compute to labor.

Thompson: How is your company SemiAnalysis thinking about token spending and this ratio between labor costs vs. AI costs?

O’Laughlin: We’re a fast-growing company. But even we’re like, “man, this is a lot of tokens.” [In April, SemiAnalysis acknowledged in a newsletter that the company “reached as high as $10.95 million dollar annual spend rate” on Anthropic Claude tokens.] So we’re figuring out the ratio of compute to labor, just like everybody else. I think it’s important to stress again that agentic AI is not even a year old. It’s been five months! No one knows the right ratio. Clearly there is value to be derived. But if you just go crazy, there are places where you’re boiling the ocean for GPUs, and you’re clearly wasting money.

Tokenomics and Bubble Fears

Thompson: When I first changed my mind about AI being a bubble, I got a lot of notes from people arguing that the unit economics of AI were broken; that consumers weren’t paying full freight for tokens; that the whole thing was being supported by venture capital subsidies; and that AI demand was going to collapse when prices rose.

Do you buy this story?

O’Laughlin: No, I don’t buy it.

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• The president used his influence over the IRS to guarantee “immunity” from all ongoing tax investigations into his family.

• The Wall Street Journal reported on nearly $1 billion worth of suspicious commodity trades made just minutes before Trump’s social-media posts about the Iran War caused oil prices to plummet, signaling a possible apperance of insider trading tied to the president’s posts.

Again and again, the president has taken the federal government in his hands, turned it upside down like a child’s piggy bank, and smacked it on the side until billions of dollars poured out of the hole in its back. As Republicans excuse his behavior by alleging misdeeds by the other side, I fear that a warped philosophy of amorality is settling over American politics, where fewer people are arguing for universal principles of decency and more people are perfectly comfortable justifying their own side’s uninterrupted immorality by insisting on the enduring presence of a greater evil on the other side.

This is no way to build a world.

After years of conservatives criticizing the left for “virtue signaling”—that is, cravenly performing a version of virtue for public approval—we now have something even worse than its opposite. The president and his allies are not merely vice-signaling. By empowering a figure who is oblivious to virtue and choosing to ignore his crescendoing depravity, we are creating a mode of politics that openly celebrates the death of morality.

This is the age of vicemaxxing. The question is whether this is our new normal—or, I hope, the sort of cultural overreach that shocks our collective conscience and sets the stage for a more decent politics.

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America in the Age of Vicemaxxing

1. People are good

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes that we can discern “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” by listening to the funny things people say when they argue with one another.

They say things like “that’s my seat, I was here first.” They say “come on, you promised.” They appeal to a moral principle.

What most interests Lewis about these quarrels is that—unless the fight is happening on a playground among cruel children, or in a prison yard among psychopaths—the other person in the fight usually accepts the principle. He rarely says, “I stole this seat because I’m stronger than you,” or “I promised, but promises are for losers.” Rather, the misbehaving person defends his behavior, not by arguing against the standard, but rather by arguing for a “special reason” or excuse to depart from the standard. They say, “I thought you’d gotten up from your seat, and now I’m all settled,” or they claim something has changed since the promise was made.

People behaving badly rarely argue that badness is defensible on its own terms. More often, they argue that the moral standard of goodness broadly applies—just not in this case. To Lewis, the basis of faith and goodness balances on the tip of one idea: Deep down, the soul of humanity is endowed with a glowing kernel of decency, a shared understanding of basic right and wrong.

Some might call this thing herd psychology, or culture. Some might call it evolutionary eusociality, or biology. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis calls it god. I don’t know what to call it. But what we call it is not so important as the fact that it exists. Morality presses on us, even when we pretend it cannot touch us. It’s there, even when people pretend that they are too special to hear it. Morality feels real, because it is. Goodness exists.

2. Trump is bad

Donald Trump is not immoral. The adjective is close but several letters off. The better word is amoral, and the difference matters. His calamitous sense of narcissistic victimhood means he cannot see principles in the first place, and he encourages those around him to imagine that the principles are fake. Ethics whizz past Trump the way sonar waves and high-pitched dog whistles evade the umwelts of ordinary people. The left-wing writer John Ganz put it this way:

His entire notion of the world comes down to personal relationships and he personalizes every concept and event. If the market goes down, someone is trying to screw you, personally. If it goes up, and you benefit, it’s because you’re smart.

Or consider the testimony of a very different source who came to the exact same conclusion. Here’s Steve Bannon from Michael Wolff’s 2017 bestseller Fire and Fury:

Bannon saw again the essential Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. The battle was between you and someone else who wanted what you had.

Fortified within the armor of his amorality, Trump kicked off his second presidency with an astonishing run of ethically indefensible nonsense:

• Taking crypto money from desperate followers, then taking medicine from dying children: In January 2025, Donald Trump launched $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency meme coin, which allowed his family to earn more than $100 million from trading fees even as more than 800,000 investors lost more than $2 billion, making it one of the most nakedly extractive presidential self-enrichment schemes in history. Three days later, the president signed an executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance, resulting in the estimated death of more than 500,000 people around the world, most of them children.

• Soliciting billionaire donations in exchange for pardons and tax cuts, while cutting health care for the poor: In March, the Trump family sought an investment from the crypto firm Binance; six months later, the president pardoned the company’s founder Changpeng Zhao, whose conviction of money laundering included one of the largest corporate penalties in history. Two weeks later, Trump pardoned the businessman Trevor Milton, who had been convicted of securities and wire fraud, several months after the Miltons donated millions of dollars to his campaign. Four weeks after that, in April, Trump pardoned the Florida tax offender Paul Walczak soon after his wife attended a $1 million fundraising dinner for the president. In July, Trump signed into law a tax cut that will save the top 0.1 percent of Americans about $300,000 a year. The law includes the largest reduction in health care spending on the poor in American history.

• Gutting government oversight while engaging in blatant corruption: In May, Trump thanked the largest buyers of $TRUMP meme coin with a private dinner at a Virginia golf club without lobbying registrations or an ethics review. Trump has fired the head of the US Office of Special Counsel, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, and more than a dozen inspectors general across federal agencies, after handing the FBI over to a conspiracy theorist and personal friend with no record in law enforcement.

In these paragraphs and juxtapositions, one can see Trumpism for what it is—not so much an ideology, or theory of a political economy, or even a political cause, but rather a pure machine of self-enrichment, one that seeks to maximize glory and income for the president, with a casual indifference or outright hostility toward any life form that doesn’t present itself as a supine resource for the extraction of wealth and power.

To point out that Trump’s lurid corruption has been bad sounds almost pathetic in its understatement. But I am trying to make a more solid point: I believe that the above paragraphs represent the kind of bad and wrong that everybody knows is bad and wrong. And by everybody, I mean not only progressive Boomers neurally tethered to primetime MSNBC but also the entire MAGA electorate. Everybody knows, in some part of their heart, soul, prefrontal cortex, or whatever, that there is no moral explanation possible for the stories I have just offered you.

How does Trump get away with it?

As Lewis writes, extraordinary efforts to bend morality require extraordinary excuses. While Trump himself may be uniquely amoral—Lewis’s frame doesn’t seem to quite touch him—the work of excuse-making falls to his followers. To justify the rise of a kleptocratic king, conservatives have to convince themselves that the threat from Trump’s enemies is so existential that it justifies their own side’s actions.

And so, they do.

In his new book The Political Vise, the Republican operative John Tillman argues that the “radical left” has commandeered America’s leading institutions in a despotic attempt remake the country as a radical woke-socialist dystopia. Like similar conceits—c.f., the Cathedral, “the Flight 93 election”—the construct of The Vise serves the purpose of “imagining the Democrats, not as a rival coalition with opposing policies, but as a unified, impersonal force that is always on the precipice of totalitarian control,” the Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Chait wrote. The imminence of this threat leaves Republicans with no choice: They must “destroy that which threatens to destroy them”—and at all costs.

Any time I raise the issue of Trump’s corruption online, the first response is invariably something along the lines of “but Biden was also bad.” This is not a tendency limited to online posting. It’s the standard response among Republican defenders of the administration:

• Asked about the president pardoning January 6 rioters, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) said: “Look at Biden and his pardons. Are you kidding me?”

• Asked about Trump using his presidency to become a cryptocurrency scion, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters, “I’ll talk to you only about [Biden’s] pardons.”

• Asked on CNBC about conflicts of interest in the family business, Eric Trump said, “Wwe’re far from Hunter Biden.”

The reasoning “…but Biden was also bad” does not make contact with an ethical principle. It is a moral blank check made out to the administration that promises to cover the cost of any transgression. The presumption that the evils of our enemies can justify any indecency is the opposite of a moral principle. “I think anyone who follows politics can tell there are no principles left in my party,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. “Even for people who agree with some of the stuff the president is doing, if you are honest with yourself, you know it is not based on principle.”

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3. The post-virtue style of politics

In his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the modern world had lost the shared moral language once provided by virtue systems, such as religion. Several months ago, I sat with a reading group to discuss the opening chapters of the book and admitted that I didn’t quite get it. “Were our ancestors really so virtuous?” I said. “If past generations of institutionalized racism, misogyny, bigotry, and violence possessed a language of virtue, of what use is that language?” I still think I was right about the egregious sins of our parents and grandparents. But I now think that MacIntyre was right, too, and it took a dash of C. S. Lewis to see just how right. In this distrustful, anti-establishment, post-institutional age, too many public conversations about right and wrong excuse the behavior of preferred groups rather than articulate a theory of virtue that extends across all groups.

Several weeks ago, the New York Times rocked the Internet with a controversial interview with the commentator Hasan Piker and the journalist Jia Tolentino, in which they described and tacitly defended the practice of stealing small things from big corporations. Tolentino admitted to pocketing a few lemons from Whole Foods, and Piker approved.

It would be absurd to equate the substance of these comments with Trump’s corruption; a snagged Whole Foods lemon is not a $1.8 billion pot of public funds to dole out to lawbreaking rioters. I am not interested in piling onto the personal attacks that followed this conversation so much as I want us to listen closely to the precise way they talked about virtue. “The rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I?” the interviewer Nadja Spiegelman said. “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,” Piker said.

Do you hear it? Surely, C. S. Lewis’s ears would have perked up. It’s special excuses all the way down. Rather than begin with a universal imperative (“Stealing is bad, and it would be bad if everyone stole all the time”), followed by a personal decision (“therefore, I don’t steal”), joined by a public policy recommendation (“therefore, I expect others in society to do the same”), you have a series of private justifications for bad behavior, each excused by the fact that some larger societal force is also bad. Instead of “I Play By the Rules, So I Expect the Rich to Do the Same,” the article’s headline offered the perfect inversion: “The Rich Don’t Play By the Rules, So Why Should I?” Out with universalist ethics, and in with individualist excuses for doing what you want.

I am not lumping Tolentino, Piker, and Spiegelman into the same bucket as the spineless corruption-excusers who sit in Congress. I am rather asking that we hear the similarities in the formal logic of their statements: the in-group’s bad behavior is justified so long as the out-group’s behavior is appropriately condemned.

My fear is that the post-virtue style of politics is here to stay. The moral blank check of “we don’t have to argue for our cause, so long as we can argue that our counterparty is worse” might prove too tantalizing for the next generation of conservatives, centrists, liberals, and leftists to resist when they hold the reins of power.

Another way is possible. In April, the political writer Isaac Saul, who has exhaustively documented Trump’s corruption, published an essay entitled “Decency is about to make a comeback.” “Obscenity feels like it has become the norm,” Saul wrote. But just as culture is the continual handoff between trend and countertrend—he notes that the death of malls seems to be reversing itself—perhaps the lurid corruption of our age will inspire a countermovement that successfully returns government to the rule of law. Like a rubber band pulled all the way back, maybe the tensions within vicemaxxing politics will spring us forward in the opposite direction.

What would a revolution of decency look like? I don’t know. I am not ready to predict the imminence of a new social gospel that extends itself across American life. I am only ready to hope for it.

Like Lewis, I think that people know good and bad. A right society cannot build itself on a pile of wrongs, and a country cannot stand on a heap of special excuses that reserve for every insider the right to misbehave on account of some external sin. Maybe one day, when enough people get tired of making excuses for the inexcusable, some leader or group will say the thing that nobody currently wants to say: “We are better than this.” And maybe it will feel good to hear it, too, because it is the rarest thing: the truth.

Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?

This was the subject of last week’s Plain English episode and a new blockbuster report from the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch. In fact it feels like just about everybody has been taking a crack at this question recently.

Some blame it on technology. One week ago, my feed was flooded with a viral video of Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, speaking about the sterilizing effects of modern technology. Among his friends, “no one’s having kids,” said Leahy, who was 30 at the time. “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”

Others blame a kind of 21st century weltschmerz—a world sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in the New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, entitled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” an excerpt from her forthcoming book Inconceivable, argued that we have “overlooked” the pervasive sense of existential uncertainty among young adults. Between climate change, rising housing costs, political instability, AI, inflation chaos, doomscrolling, and declining social trust, today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.

So who is right? Is this about phones and technology, or is it a reflection of modern anxiety about the world? Or, perhaps, both?

I always like to begin my analysis of the subject here: Any complete and responsible explanation of this phenomenon cannot begin in the 21st century and should never pretend that this is some tragedy brought about by exclusively terrible things. Birthrates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined; as women’s education has increased; as female labor force participation has soared; as modern contraception has proliferated; and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures. And birthrates have continued to decline around, or even accelerated in their downturn in developed countries, as smartphone usage has surged; as housing prices of increased; as time spent at home on the Internet has grown; and as socialization and coupling have declined.

The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As Burn-Murdoch reported, UN demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000—a whopping 50 percent miss. The total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in almost every country in North America, South America, Europe, and Southern and Eastern Asia. It’s falling swiftly in most African countries. And birthrates might be set to crash in China. In the 2026 paper “The Rise of Zero Fertility Desire in China,” a Brown University researcher reported that according to the China General Social Survey, the share of young women with “no desire for children” increased from approximately 5 percent in 2012 to 47 percent in 2023.

The epicenters of the baby bust will surprise many people. Europe has a higher fertility rate than Thailand. Tokyo has a higher fertility than Mexico City, Bogotá, or Santiago. China may already a lower fertility rate than Japan.

“Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.”

In today’s interview, Fernández-Villaverde explains:

• Demographics 101: Defining total fertility rate, replacement rate, and momentum

• Why the world has probably already passed “peak child”

• Why 2023 was the first year in human history that the global fertility rate likely fell below the replacement rate

• Why the question “why is the birthrate declining?” is so hard to answer quickly

• Why most people underrate the long-term effects of low birthrates on world affairs

• The compounding effects of sub-replacement level fertility: “If Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for the next 200 years without immigration, its population will decline from 63 million to 2 million.”

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WHY DOES FERTILITY MATTER, AT ALL?

Derek Thompson: Why is fertility important?

Fernández-Villaverde: Because demographics is destiny. The number of children born today will determine how our society will look in 30 to 40 years. The year 2023 was a unique year in the history of humanity, because it’s the first time our total fertility rate as a planet fell below replacement rate. That has never happened before in 200,000 years. That means the world population will peak in another 30 years or so if the trend continues. Some things will be good, some will not be so good.

Thompson: Tell me what replacement level means and what total fertility rate means.

Fernández-Villaverde: Let’s start with replacement, which is the easiest. Imagine you have a population of one million people. How many children need to be born for that population to be constant at one million in the long run? It turns out that for every woman in that population, you need 2.1 kids.

Why 2.1 and not 2.0? Two reasons. First, there are a little more boys born than girls, around 105 boys for every 100 girls, if you don’t do anything like selective abortions. Second, not all girls who are born will move on to become mothers themselves. They will die of accidents or other reasons before they enter their fertile ages. So you need every woman to have 2.1 kids on average to keep population constant. That’s the replacement rate.

The total fertility rate is an estimate of how many children women will have in a given population. When we look at the U.S. right now, the fertility rate is around 1.57. That means the average American woman is having 1.57 kids. Because the replacement rate is 2.1, a way to think about it is that we have a shortfall of slightly over 0.5 kids. There is a subtlety I want the audience to understand. The total fertility rate is an estimate. It’s slightly different from what we call completed fertility. Completed fertility is when I go back to women who are already 50 years old and see how many kids they actually had. The problem with completed fertility, which is what we really care about in the very long run, is that by definition it takes decades before we can compute it. So if we are going to make any forecast about the future, we cannot rely on completed fertility.

Thompson: In your Miami speech, you said “peak child” might already be behind us. I want you to explain what that means and why, if peak child is already behind us, the global population isn’t already falling.

Fernández-Villaverde: Let me start with the second and come back to the first. In demography there is something called momentum.

Momentum means the population will keep growing for 15 to 30 years after you fall below the replacement rate. Let me give a simple example. Imagine you have a spouse and only one kid. You are below replacement rate, but you are two. You have two parents, your spouse has two parents. You are not replacing yourselves, but your parents have not died yet. The fact that you have one kid still increases the population. The problem is when your parents die, we have not replaced them.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of women were born on the planet. They had their kids in the 2010s, and that’s why the population is still growing. The grandparents of these girls have not died yet. What will happen is that when these grandparents, the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s, start dying, that’s when the population goes down. The analogy I love to use: think about a gigantic oil tanker. When you start changing the direction of the oil tanker, it has so much momentum that it takes time before it turns, but it is already cooked in. The number of children on the planet has been going down since around 2012. It’s just that their grandparents have not died yet.

And then the first point: yes, as a planet we are below replacement rate. We are not producing enough kids to keep the population constant. There are countries like the U.S. and Western Europe for which we have very good data. There are countries in Sub-Saharan Africa where the data is not so good. So all of this is done with some degree of uncertainty. I’m pretty sure it was 2023, but it may be the case that in 10 years, where we have slightly better data, it may have been 2022 or 2024. The big picture doesn’t change if it is one year up or another. Everything we observe is that fertility on the planet is continuing to go down very fast. In 2024, fertility was below 2023, and in 2025 it was below 2024. My educated forecast is that we are going to continue seeing this drop in fertility for the next 20 to 30 years, nearly for sure.

Thompson: Given your educated estimate, what is the decade when the global population will start its structural decline?

Fernández-Villaverde: At this moment, I would say 2055. In 2055, the world population will start going down.

WHO WAS WRONG?

Thompson: If you go back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for public intellectuals to predict the global population would rise and rise until the environment buckled and we suffered ecological disaster and widespread famine that wiped out billions of human souls. That has not happened. Global fertility has declined significantly. It’s falling faster than practically anybody predicted, certainly folks like Paul Ehrlich, author of the infamous book The Population Bomb. Why do you think these so-called experts were both so confident and so wrong?

Fernández-Villaverde: The wording of your question already tells you a lot about the answer, because you used the word “public intellectual.” You didn’t use the word “demographers.”

I’m a professor at Penn, and we have—sorry to brag—what I think is one of the best demographics groups in the world. Had you gone to our population study center in 1968 or 1969 and asked professional demographers what they thought about Ehrlich’s book, they would have probably said, “Eh!” Ehrlich, who was not a demographer, was very good at tapping into a lot of the anxieties people had at the time. I reread the book two years ago, and what surprised me is that all this vocabulary we have introduced is not to be found there. He never wants to define carefully what replacement rate is. He never wants to define carefully what total fertility rate is. He uses the term “birth rate.” The birth rate is the number of children born per 1,000 population. Birth rates are seriously affected by the momentum effects I mentioned before. I would argue the book was not very good at the time, and what a lot of the public intellectuals were saying was not really what the best demographers were saying.

Thompson: I want to push back. It’s not that I want to defend Ehrlich, but rather I want to be clear that your research also seems to disagree strongly with expert demographers today. You’ve said that you think the United Nations is over-estimating the total fertility rate of many countries. Why are today’s experts wrong?

Fernández-Villaverde: You need to understand that the incentives you have when you are putting numbers on the table at a university and at a public policy institution are very different. I’m a professor. Short of me saying something absolutely outrageous and hateful, my dean is not going to complain. My dean is only going to say, “If you think this is what the data says, I’m happy with you.”

But when you’re at a public policy institution, you have to follow an institutional framework, and you need to stick with the party line. The Population Division of the United Nations was created because there was a serious concern that we were having a population bomb. It is true, and I want to hedge a little bit what I was saying about Ehrlich, that fertility was very high in the 1950s and 1960s. What demographers were saying then, which Ehrlich did not, is that fertility was likely to start going down, that it was not such an abysmal thing as Ehrlich was saying.

It’s very difficult for an institution that has spent 60 years saying we had a population bomb to wake up and say, “There is no population bomb.” It’s costly in terms of institutional prestige. It’s costly in terms of communication. It’s costly in terms of even the people working there, who were very committed to a narrative. If you actually look at the UN’s projections, they have been dialing down a lot of their statements about population over the last decade.

In fact, the UN has three scenarios: low fertility, middle fertility, high fertility. My scenario and their low fertility scenario are on top of each other. It’s not that I’m very far away from the UN. We are already fighting about the second decimal. The problem is that these things, even at the second decimal, accumulate over half a century.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING IN SO MANY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AT THE SAME TIME?

Thompson: I think a lot of people believe falling fertility is mostly a rich country phenomenon. But you point out that’s a misconception. Total fertility rate is lower than the U.S. in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Thailand. If we want to understand why this is happening at a global level, and global synchronized phenomena like this are rare, where do we begin?

Fernández-Villaverde: There are several hypotheses on the table, and I’m going to list them in what I think is their relative importance.

First, there’s been a huge change in social norms worldwide. This probably has a lot to do with social media and cell phones. People watch a TV show about how people live in California or New York, and they say, “Why not something like that for me?” TV changed a little bit of social norms, but Internet, TikTok, X is really a completely different ballgame. In particular, this has mattered a lot in countries where there is not a lot of gender balance in social norms. If you’re in a country like South Korea, or in many Latin American countries, where household work allocation is very unequal, suddenly a lot of younger women are looking at the world and saying, “Why am I going to be working for my husband 24 hours a day?” Social media has really changed that perception.

Second, we have moved to an economy that is much more service-based. Service-based economies, even in India and Africa, mean people don’t work in factories that much anymore, or even in agriculture. They work in shops, they work in offices. Those are jobs much easier for women to have because they don’t depend on physical strength. In Mexico, Brazil, or Colombia, if you are a woman 22 or 23 years old with a decent job in the service sector, and a guy comes to you and tells you, “If we get married, I’m going to be the macho in the home, ruling everything, you are going to work for me all the time, and we are going to have three kids,” you tell the guy, “No.”

Third is what I have called the educational arms race. It used to be the case that a high school degree was the pathway to middle-class life. Those times are gone. Now sometimes not even a college degree is enough for a middle-class life. You need a master’s degree or some postgraduate education. People are staying much longer in school. They are marrying or forming partnerships much later in life. When they are thinking about their kids, they understand they will need to maintain their kids and educate their kids for many, many years. This is particularly true in Asia, in China, Korea, and Japan, where [there is pressure for] your kid to excel in high school and college. Those are the countries with the lowest fertility rates.

The last is housing. In many countries, not in all, housing is at historical heights in relative price. That also limits the ability of families to have more children.

Thompson: Let me summarize what I’m hearing and offer my own framework.

You’re saying that media—phones, the internet, television—have globalized Western values and in particular globalized Western feminism, which has empowered women to determine their own fertility. The ability, the freedom, and the power of women to determine their own fertility has, in country after country, pulled total fertility rate from seven, six, five to around two or one. That’s happened around the world. You also brought in economics: moving from an agrarian to a manufacturing to a services economy might have its own natural effect on lowering total fertility rate, and the cost of housing might also move total fertility rate at the margins.

Two other issues I want to put on the table. First, contraception. Second, socialization rates in the West and throughout East Asia have gone down. People socialize less, they couple up less.

When you put all of this together, having kids has gone from being a necessity or a predestination to a choice. Once having children feels like a social or cultural choice, that rules in other questions such as “can we afford more children?” People were having seven, eight kids when it was difficult for them to afford a house, when they had no money, when food and clothing and home costs were their entire budget, and there was no money left over for pet care and spa days. They were still having seven or eight kids. When economic and cultural norms required high fertility rates, having children wasn’t a choice in the first place. Now it is. In America, you can get married and not have children and still basically live a completely normal economic and social and cultural life.

So I wonder how you feel about this cultural argument that a series of technological and economic and social changes essentially flipped a switch where having children used to be a necessity and a predestination, and now it is a choice.

Fernández-Villaverde: At the very basic level, I fully agree. My PhD dissertation in 2001 was basically an exploration of this mechanism. That’s why I already forecasted back in 2001 that fertility was going to drop a lot. But if you stopped the Jesús of 2001 and told him Colombia’s fertility was 2.8 or 3 then, and asked me where I thought Colombia’s fertility would be in 2026, given all these mechanisms, I would have probably said 1.8, 1.7.

What the Jesús of 2001 would have been enormously surprised by is that it’s not 1.8 or 1.7. It’s 1.1.

Let me put it this way. A fertility of 1.9 basically means most people are having two kids, which is your idea of the perfect suburban family: a boy and a girl, a nice house, and a few people who don’t have kids. A total fertility rate of 1 is really a situation where many, many women only have one kid, and a lot of women have zero. That’s what has surprised me, that we have not gone from seven to two. We have gone down much, much further.

You were mentioning contraception. The US was around 1.9 in 2000. There was lots of contraception in the US in 2000. And in 2000, the U.S. was already a service-based economy. It was already a world where women were empowered, maybe not as much as today, but not very different from today. So why have we gone from the 1.9 of 2000 to the 1.57 of today? That is the mystery.

Thompson: I like that. I haven’t quite thought about it that way: there’s one set of explanations that can explain why total fertility rate in a country might go from five to two, but you might need a separate set of explanations that explain why fertility would go from two, roughly replacement level, to one, a situation where the population is halving itself every few decades.

THE MOST SURPRISING STATISTIC

Thompson: Where is the most surprising fertility collapse in the world?

Fernández-Villaverde: Latin America. If you ask which is the main continent right now undergoing an amazing demographic revolution in terms of fertility collapse that is not covered in the mainstream media, it’s Latin America.

Let me give my favorite example: Guatemala. I love Guatemala. I have many good friends from Guatemala. But Guatemala was not really a shining example of development in Central America. Around 2006 or 2007, I’m quoting from memory, Guatemala had a fertility rate of 3.9, basically the fertility rate of a Sub-Saharan African country. Last year, it was probably around 1.9, 1.8. The fact that in 20 years Guatemala has cut in half its total fertility rate is mind-blowing. At the current speed, Guatemala will have a lower fertility rate than non-Hispanic whites in five years.

Let me give another statistic, now coming to the U.S. The fertility rate of African Americans fell in 2024 below the fertility rate of non-Hispanic whites for the first time since the creation of the Republic. The fertility rate of African Americans was always quite higher, stayed high for quite a long time, and then started going down. The fertility rate of non-Hispanic whites also went down, but the fertility rate of African Americans went down much faster. At some moment in the first quarter of 2024, the lines crossed. If you are asking which are the groups with the lowest fertility rates in the US, my answer would be African Americans, which is completely different from what a lot of the discourse is. Who is having kids in the US? Rich white suburban families. Who is not having kids in the US? Poor African American urban families.

These are the fundamental changes that are hard to explain with a naive, “We went from agriculture where in my farm I needed seven kids to living in a city where I only have two.” That explanation is perfectly fine. That’s what my dissertation was about. Why suddenly in Colombia and Guatemala, in Chile, in Bolivia, in Brazil, have people decided to stop having kids so quickly?

The second region in the world where fertility is collapsing incredibly fast is North Africa and the Middle East. Morocco is already below replacement rate. Tunisia is very low. Egypt is falling incredibly fast. All across the Middle East, fertility is falling very, very fast. Those are the countries that will not come to mind. But coming back to the beginning of the answer, Latin America is really the poster child of, “I don’t have a very good explanation for this.”

HOW FERTILITY SHAPES THE FUTURE

Thompson: I want to move on to implications. Before I do, I want to say clearly that when we discuss the reasons for declining fertility around the world, we listed a set of reasons that combined negative motivators, like affordability and lack of housing, with things I think are objectively good. More education for women is good. More freedom for women is good. I’m very pro-contraception. I’m very pro-access to contraception. So the reasons for the decline of fertility are a mix of, I think, quite clearly good things and arguably bad things. Similarly, the implications of the decline of fertility combine both upsides and downsides. Let’s talk about the upsides first.

Fernández-Villaverde: First and foremost, we can ease the pressure on natural resources. In a world where population doesn’t grow or where population starts going down, we will consume less energy, or the growth of energy consumption will be smaller. We don’t need to build that many highways. We don’t need to build that many new dams. We don’t need to extract that many minerals. That’s good for the environment.

Second, it will help us redesign a lot of cities across the world. Cities, especially in emerging economies, grew very fast from the 1960s to today, and the result is not very pretty. You may go to a Latin American city and it has a pretty colonial center, which is where tourists go and take photographs and take a TikTok video. But when you go to the places where the average person lives, they are not great. If we have much lower population pressure, we don’t need to build as fast as we did in the 1960s and 1970s. I’m originally from Madrid in Spain. A lot of the residential neighborhoods in Madrid are ugly. People don’t see those when they come to visit Madrid, but they are really ugly, because in the 1960s and 1970s when population was growing very fast, you had to build these horrible high-rises just to put people under a roof. We are not going to need those ugly high-rises. We can demolish them. We can redesign our cities, have much more livable cities, medium density, places that are much more pleasant to live.

And then, if people are not having kids because they don’t think it’s in their best interest, who am I to complain? I’m an economist, and economists tend to have, by default, a slightly libertarian view of life. If this is what you want to do, that’s what you want to do.

Thompson: What are the downsides?

Fernández-Villaverde: We need to adapt, and adaptation can be costly. The obvious thing that comes to mind is Social Security. Everything related to retirement benefits, Social Security payments, the equivalent of Medicare and similar health programs for the elderly across the world, that’s going to impose a tremendous amount of cost on the planet. But also you are going to start being forced to close primary schools. The school district here in Philadelphia, where I live, was just forced to announce a couple of weeks ago that they are closing a lot of primary schools because there are no kids. That’s a serious disruption for a lot of local communities. Many parts of Philadelphia do not have such a nice environment as they could have, and the local school not only plays the role of an educational institution. It also plays the role of a social club. You use the gym for a lot of social events. Now that the school is closed, you are not going to have the gym to do social events. That causes a lot of disruption. You will be forced to close hospitals. You will be forced to close a lot of other public services.

Finally, if fertility really stays at 1 or 1.1 for a long time, I don’t think we appreciate how big a change this is. Now I’m going to make a crazy forecast, and I want everyone to understand this is a crazy forecast. Let’s suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around two million people.

Thompson: Sorry, two million?

Fernández-Villaverde: Two million. How do you wind down a society of 63 million people into two million? When population starts falling a lot, countries may do crazy subsidies for having kids, things can change. Maybe the people who are still having kids tend to have more kids and they grow as a share of the population. All those things can happen. I’m just highlighting that these things compound over time. You are going from a society that has 63 million people to a society that has two million. It means you need to close 98% of the hospitals of the country. It means you need to close 98% of the schools of the country.

Thompson: What’s the population of Philadelphia?

Fernández-Villaverde: Philadelphia is around one and a half million right now, maybe a little less.

Thompson: One and a half million is not so different from two million. You’re talking about the nation of Thailand having a population in 200 years that’s a little larger than the city of Philadelphia. It’s not even possible for me to comprehend.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly. People have the idea this is going to be about closing some hospitals. No, this is not about closing some hospitals. This is about closing 98% of the hospitals.

Thompson: Or it is about closing hospitals in the next five years. But you’re saying this is a phenomenon that’s like a tectonic plate.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly.

Thompson: It’s going to keep moving. History is going to play out on top of that tectonic plate. And if it doesn’t stop moving for 100, 200 years, you have a situation where Thailand becomes Philadelphia.

I want to keep pulling on this thread because this conversation reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Rob Meyer, who’s the editor-in-chief of Heatmap. We were talking about climate change. He said, “Derek, the problem with climate change, the most interesting problem of climate change, the most significant problem of climate change, is not the fact that temperature goes up. It’s the second and third-order effects. Temperatures going up increase the likelihood of famines. A famine in Syria creates a population flow into the Mediterranean. That creates a refugee crisis at the borders of European countries. That creates an immigration influx into Germany under Angela Merkel. That creates a populist backlash across Central Europe.”

After just four easy steps, and this is not a hypothetical, this happened 10 or 15 years ago, a phenomenon that sounds like it’s about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is actually about the rise of populism in Europe. Taking that as inspiration, I wonder whether there are other knock-on effects that you and other demographers thinking in the span of decades and centuries worry about. One quick example to me would be a lot of modern liberalism is built on the presumption of positive-sum interactions. But a positive-sum philosophy requires growth. In a world without growth, my earning more income is not positive-sum. I’m taking income from somebody else because it’s a zero-sum environment. A world where population is declining and productivity is not increasing is a world where GDP growth on a year-to-year basis is something like zero to negative 0.5%. You’re talking about a permanent stagnation or recession. That’s a world of zero-sum growth, and that’s a world where a lot of values I consider positive liberalism are no longer feasible because in some cases they might not be true. So without necessarily endorsing that particular fear, what do you see as some of the more interesting or scary second-order effects?

Fernández-Villaverde: Let me give an example that is a very close analog. Let me take Spain because I know it very well. We have had very low fertility for a long time. That means our Social Security payments have ballooned, which means the younger population needs to pay a tremendous amount of taxes to sustain that elder population. People are not happy about it. People are saying, “I’m happy to pay 25% of my income in taxes to pay for Social Security, but I’m not happy to pay 50%.” It’s not that I want to pay zero, but I don’t want to work half of my day just to pay taxes. In Spain right now, there are two conservative parties. Europe is slightly different from the US because we have proportional representation, while the US has first past the vote. In political systems with proportional representation, political change happens by the appearance of new parties. We have a mainstream Conservative Party, which would be the Republican Party of the Mitt Romneys, George Bush father, your country-club Republican, who likes to talk about lowering taxes and breaking investment. And there is a radical right-wing party, and this radical right-wing party is, among other things, about these redistribution issues you are mentioning.

Look at all the electorate in Spain that votes right, and divide it between those under 50 and those above 50. Those under 50, the radical party is the larger party by a very long margin. Those above 50, the country-golf-club Conservative is the dominant party. It’s not just a little difference. If you go for those under 25, no one under 25 is voting for the mainstream Conservative Party, and no one over 65 is voting for the radical right-wing party. The demographic change and the pressure this has put on the Spanish government budget basically means the way right-wing votes in Spain have allocated has changed drastically, and that has completely changed the policy of Spain among tons of things.

Thompson: It also seems to me that the politics of immigration become a significant and unavoidable part of sustaining the welfare state, because what do you need to sustain a welfare state? You need taxable income. Where does the income come from? It comes from people. And if you’re running out of people, you need to import people, and that’s called immigration. But in my experience as someone who lives thousands of miles away from Europe, it seems to me like practically every country that allows immigrants to become a certain share of their population almost always has a populist backlash. I’m not rooting for that outcome. It’s just what I often see.

It means you’re stuck in this almost like a Chinese finger trap, where you need to increase taxable income on the one hand, but doing so in a low-fertility environment can only require either slashing Social Security or adding immigrants. But adding immigrants increases populism. Slashing Social Security creates another backlash. So you find yourself in an environment where there is no long-term popular solution to your political problems. That’s what I see as an outsider.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly. When I talk about these problems, someone always raises their hand and says, “Yeah, we will just bring in a few immigrants and that will fix the problem.” Let’s go back to the example of Japan. Japan right now is around 98% ethnically Japanese. If we wanted to keep the population of Japan constant in 200 years through immigration, in 200 years Japan will be 5% Japanese and 95% non-Japanese. This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan. You may say, “I’m perfectly fine. I’m not attached to the idea of Japan in the abstract.” But I can see a lot of Japanese say, “This is not about being a xenophobe. This is not about being anti-immigrant. This is about not having a country anymore.”

Let me give a concrete example. In Spain, in addition to Spanish, we have regional languages like Catalan. The problem is Catalonia is getting a lot of immigrants. The immigrants are not Catalan speakers. Their kids may learn Catalan in school, but they don’t speak Catalan. Given the current level of immigration, Catalan, I have forecast, is doomed as a language. It will not exist. Some people will always speak it in a small village in the mountains, but as a working language of day-to-day life, Catalan is doomed. You see it in all the statistics. Look at people under 25, look at people under 30, very clearly the language is dying. If you’re a native Catalan speaker, this is existential. So this is not about being anti-immigrant because I’m a nasty guy. This is not about being racist. This is just about saying, “Don’t I have a right to my language to still exist?” I’m an immigrant myself, so it’s not that I’m against immigration. But like everything, it needs to be within a reasonable degree.

Thompson: You’re making what seems to be an almost mathematical point. A population that does not replace itself with fertility will either die off or find itself replaced by people born in another country. There’s no other way for the math to work out. This is why over the centuries, low fertility becomes not just a numbers problem, not just an economic problem, not just a welfare-state taxation problem, but a political problem and a cultural problem.

You said only two things that matter in the world. We’ve spent 99% of this episode on one of them, fertility. The other one is deep learning, AI. If Korea’s total fertility rate is 1.0 or below in the 2020s, 2030s, and 2040s, its population is going to be shrinking fast by the 2050s and 2060s. But AI also benefits from this principle of scale. This technology that in 2022 often failed to do basic arithmetic is now identifying cybersecurity vulnerabilities better than the best coders in the world. How do these trends intersect?

Fernández-Villaverde: They intersect to some degree, but not as much as sometimes people think. Let me tell you where you are absolutely right. If thanks to artificial intelligence and robotics, a lot of jobs can be done by computers and robots, and that generates a lot of economic growth and that helps us to pay for Social Security, that will make the transition much easier. I’m a bit of a techno-optimist in that sense, and I’m glad this is happening. I think it’s going to give us more degrees of freedom to adapt our society.

But coming back to my point before, this is just not about GDP. My wife and I love to go to a small village in England to spend some time on vacation. It’s a lovely English village. They recently closed the local pub because of population decline. The problem is the local pub in an English village is not just the place you go for a beer. It’s the place where you meet your neighbors. It’s the social gathering place of the village. How are you going to substitute that with artificial intelligence?

That’s what worries me. A lot of the things that make us human are not about being able to produce a lot of widgets with robots. It’s about our social interactions. Thinking again about Thailand, if we are going to be two and a half million, we pretty much need to abandon most of the country and make it empty, because to run things like hospitals you need scale. So we are going to abandon 90% of the country and leave it to the wild side. Artificial intelligence is not going to be able to do much about that. Those are the challenges I don’t think people quite appreciate. I’m a techno-optimist. I love artificial intelligence. I do a lot of artificial intelligence in my own work. But we need to be careful about what it can and cannot deliver in terms of fertility.

In this edition, I’m trying something a bit more ambitious. I’ve organized the morsels of information under several themes—let’s call them: “megatrends”—that define the 2026 news cycle and that I think will continue to shape the world in the months, and years, to come.

Today’s megatrends span economics, health, artificial intelligence, culture, politics, and media. Free subscribers will get to read the first two megatrends, on economics and health—plus a “historical interlude” that was too interesting to leave out. Only paid subscribers will get to read more about the state of AI, a paradox in politics, and an eerie new trend in the media.

Megatrend #1: CULTURE
The Anti-Social Century

A little announcement that probably won’t be surprising to folks who’ve followed my work in the last year: I’ve signed a contract for my next book, and it will be about the ideas I’ve worked on for the last year that I’ve been calling “the anti-social century.” I see this as a natural follow-up to Abundance. If abundance is a critique of, and solution for, the problems of material flourishing—how do we build homes, reduce energy costs, power technology, and invent scientific breakthroughs, all of which can make people’s lives easier and better?—the anti-social century addresses the cultural, or “post-material,” problems that are often beyond the scope of political economy. The last few years have seen an astonishing decline in happiness and sociality in the U.S., which has coincided with a rise in alone time, anxiety, mental distress, and a toxic form of individualism that I described in “The Monks in the Casino.” I want to better understand how this happened and what “we”—at the level of individuals and institutions—can do to fix it.

1. Life as “time spent with.” One of my favorite graphs from the miraculous Our World in Data site is this breakdown of how the typical American spends their day between the ages of 15 and 80. One way to read this chart is that time spent with our parents peaks in our late teen years; time spent with friends peaks in our early 20s; time spent with coworkers peaks in our mid- to late-20s; time spent with our children peaks in our 30s and 40s; time spent with our partners peaks in our 60s and 70s, and time spent alone increases steadily as we get older. One way to think about the anti-social century is that it is a kind of society-wide conspiracy to increase alone time, due to a phalanx of forces that are reducing time spent with practically everybody who isn’t “just me.”

1. Time spent with partners, children, coworkers, and friends declines as Americans couple less, have fewer children, work alone, and spend less time with friends. Partner time declines as Americans are dating and marrying less. While parents are spending more time with their children, fewer Americans are having kids in the first place. Between 1976 and 2024, the share of women 40-44 years old without children increased by 80 percent and the share of “never married” women increased by more than 50 percent. With the rise of remote work and sole proprietor firms, or one-person startups, there is less time spent among coworkers. As for teenage friendship, the numbers are dire. The share of 12th graders who “ever go on dates” has declined by 47 percent since the 1980s; the share who “visit friends weekly” has declined 22 percent; and the share who “go to monthly parties” is down 40 percent, according to the Institute for Family Studies.

Put it all together and Americans are spending more time alone than in any period for which we have good data. This is especially true for young Americans, who have historically been the most social group.

3. There are many forces to blame, but just for now, let’s blame American parenting. According to the Institute for Family Studies, one in ten teenagers isn’t allowed to leave the house without an adult companion, and 80 percent aren’t allowed to leave the neighborhood without an adult. The latchkey generation of kids who came and went without supervision gave way to a helicopter model of intensive parenting and strictly guarded childhood. Homebound and phone-bound, today’s adolescents and teens spend more time in their rooms and less time playing with friends than any cohort ever studied.

3. There are some reasons to be optimistic. I see more people paying attention to the problem of solitude and thinking about socializing as social fitness—something that you “should” do not only because it’s fun but also because it’s physically and neurologically good for you. I’m also seeing more policies to increase socializing. If the last 20 years has been an uncontrolled experiment to roll out phones to children without much care for how it would affect their mental health, we might be in a new phase of controlled experiments to deprive young people of those same devices. A giant study of school phone bans published in April found that “lockable phone pouches” did not significantly improve school attendance or self-reported classroom attention, while average effects on test scores were “consistently close to zero,” with high schools seeing modest positive effects. That all sounds rather dispiriting. But the lasting effects on happiness seemed real: phone bans seem to cause first-year disruptions followed by real increases in subjective well-being.

The philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote in The Technological Society that new technologies shape us as much as we shape them; what they make efficient becomes what we value. A child, or an adult, or an entire civilization might think that they are using a new technology neutrally or instrumentally, but over time institutions reorganize themselves around what technology makes expedient. I think this is essentially what phones have done to the modern world. College students and study participants consistently claim that they regret much of their phone use, but the technological capability of the phone to command and hold attention consistently overrides the traditional communal value to spend more time with books, in nature, or around other people.

There is another way. Toward the end of my reporting for the anti-social century cover story for The Atlantic, I came across a reference to the novel Seveneves, in which Neal Stephenson coined the term “Amistics.” Derived from the notoriously anti-tech Amish, the word refers to the practice of carefully selecting which technologies to accept or reject. Far from dispensing with all new technology, the Amish take pains to adopt only those new products that uphold their existing values. So, solar and wind energy is allowed, because it enables useful work, but television is out, because it interferes with family time. As I wrote:

If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment…

We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification?

MEGATREND #2: HEALTH
Building the Do-It-All Drug

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic (semaglutide), made by Novo Nordisk, and Zepbound (tirzepatide), made by Eli Lilly, have demonstrated extraordinary effects beyond the treatment of type-2 diabetes and obesity. In the last few months, randomized studies have shown GLP-1s can reduce psoriasis severity by up to 80%, treat addiction disorders, ameliorate several kinds of mental distress, and melt fatty liver disease. New and better GLP-1 drugs are waiting in the wings. Let’s review what these drugs can and can’t yet do—and what’s coming next.

1. Help with addiction disorders? Yes. A placebo-controlled, double-blind trial of Ozempic found that the drug reduced both heavy drinking days and overall alcohol consumption among people seeking treatment for addiction.

2. Help with mental distress and anxiety? Yup. An April study of more than 100,000 people in Swedish electronic health registers found that semaglutide use was associated with lower risk of worsening mental illness, self-harm, depression, anxiety, and worsening substance use disorder.

3. Crush fatty liver disease? 100%. (Er, well, 80%.) The next big GLP-1 drug coming down the pike is retatrutide. While the first generation of GLP-1 drugs targets the GLP-1 hormone exclusively, Lilly’s popular Mounjaro drug (a.k.a., tirzepatide) targets two hormones: GLP-1 and GIP. Retatrutide is a triple agonist that targets three gut hormones: GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. Reta is most celebrated for its historic weight-loss effects, which seem even more dramatic than tirzepatide or semaglutide. But in a recent study, patients on retatrutide saw an 80 percent reduction in liver fat. Fatty liver disease affects millions of Americans, and there is no FDA-approved treatment for it other than admonitions to lose weight. But retatrutide’s targeting of glucagon seems to melt liver fat even more effectively than it causes weight loss.

4. Stop Alzheimer’s? Not yet. A Novo Nordisk-funded trial of oral semaglutide among elderly Americans found that the drug did not seem to slow worsening Alzheimer’s symptoms. In the charts below, you’ll see two groups—BLUE on semaglutide vs. RED on a placebo. The nearly identical declines on a cognitive test over 156 weeks indicate that GLP-1s failed to make much of a difference in the progression of the disease. (It’s still possible that the use of GLP-1s earlier in life reduces the likelihood of ever developing Alzheimer’s, but this hasn’t been studied yet, and a high-quality study could take many years, or even decades.)

5. Fuck everything, we’re doing five agonists. The Onion once published an article entitled “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades,” in which an imaginary Gillette executive proposes adding a fifth blade to the company’s new razor. (”I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!”) Well, somebody from pharma took that essay as inspiration. While semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide target one, two, and three hormones, respectively, scientists are now exploring a quintuple agonist “that combines the body weight-reducing and blood glucose-lowering effects of GLP-1R–GIPR co-agonism with the insulin-sensitizing and anti-inflammatory effects of lanifibranor via its targeted delivery into GLP-1R- and GIPR-expressing cells.” As scientists add targets, one could imagine a GLP-1 drug that both melts fat, fights inflammation, and even preserves muscle tone. In other words, I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth agonist in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!

Historical interlude: Creativity secrets of Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas could write. What the man couldn’t do was stop writing. By his death, Dumas had produced more than 100,000 pages of book text, which is the equivalent of writing a novel the length of War and Peace every seven months, for four straight decades. In his miracle years of 1844 to 1846, Dumas wrote both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the latter of which is both incredibly long (more than 1,200 pages in most modern editions) and also considered by many one of the greatest novels of all time.

How did he do it? Dumas was “often accused of operating a fiction factory,” Michael Dirda writes. But the fact that none of his research assistants achieved anything of note on their own strongly suggests that Dumas was the final hand to put pen to paper. His workflow:

[Dumas’s] particular genius lay in transmuting dry historical records into vibrant page-turners through his mastery of dialogue, pacing, and dramatic confrontation. Dumas would first talk over a book with an assistant, perhaps ask him to do some research and prepare an outline, then follow up with further discussion of the action and plot, this time in more detail. Only when he had settled the whole are of the novel in his own mind did Dumas put pen to paper. As he once said, “As a rule I do not begin a book until it is finished.” He then wrote fast, a single draft on blue paper, never bothering about accents, commas, and punctuation, working long hours at a time.

“Do not begin a piece of writing until it is finished” is a fun idea. Personally, I think my best essays are similarly “finished” before they are “started.” That is, if I begin the writing process without really knowing what I want to say, I wind up not saying much of anything but rather circling, circling, circling a strong contention that would have been better developed if I had done more research or talked to more people. My best essays are sometimes the ones whose theses I can describe in detail before I write the first sentence of the final draft.

MEGATREND #3: THE STATE OF AI
Apocalypse Nope

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