Derek Thompson, a journalist, writes essays on economics, demographics, health, media, technology and American culture.
Commenters link it in discussions of internet culture, housing, and why America feels unhappy; the given comments mostly use the posts as references rather than judge them.
There's really overwhelming evidence that exercise itself has a causal role, and it only gets more impactful the more effective it is at raising your fitness (i.e., given the logistical constraints of your life, the more that the exercise you can do raises your strength and endurance, the greater the benefits without a clear obvious ceiling (though the benefits do get increasingly marginal)).
Even if we lived in a world where it didn't causally extend lifespan, the extension to healthspan [0] or QALYs [1] alone would be reason enough.
Derek Thompson's written about recent research to this effect [2]:
"Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put rats on tiny treadmills, worked them out for weeks, and cut into them to investigate how their organs and vessels responded to the workout compared to a control group of more sedentary rodents. The results were spectacular. Exercise transformed just about every tissue and molecular system that Ashley and his co-authors studied—not just the muscles and heart, but also the liver, adrenal glands, fat, and immune system.
"When I asked Ashley if it was possible to design a drug that mimicked the observed effects of exercise, he was emphatic that, no, this was not possible. The benefits of exercise seem too broad for any one therapy to mimic. To a best approximation, aerobic fitness and weight-training seem to increase our…
I wonder how much this might change in the coming years purely from GLP-1s. Articles like this[0] (which yes, Betteridge's law applies) talk about how it’s pretty likely they’ll be able to be used by everyone. But even now, taking people with cardiovascular high probabilities and dropping that risk way down purely by giving them the feeling that they’re more full more frequently is crazy to think about. Not sure opinions here but I’m at the point of telling my parents they should both be on these right now in their upper 60s.
Some people shrug it off or claim that they’re higher status because they lost weight via diet and exercise, but I map that to people who think they’re better programmers because they don’t use llms for coding, when the real result is what matters. Similar to people thinking AI slop, there are news articles about what happens if you stop GLP-1s and gain the weight back. But the stories of people who either continue to microdose, or also learn the feelings of their body and how it differs have long term success. Similar to those who know how to work with llms get good results, but the news is about how smarter people don’t use it.
All very interesting subjects. What a world we’re in.
[0] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-does-it-seem-like-glp-1-drugs
> We live in extremely safe times compared to
This sentence in a HN article from a day ago caught my eye [1][2].
> Second, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, according to Sarygulov and Arslanagic-Wakefield. Early antibiotics in the 1930s, followed by the mass production of penicillin in the 1940s, “drove down incidences of sepsis, [which were] responsible for 40 percent of maternal deaths at the time, and made caesarean sections safer,” they write.
94 percent!
[1] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-boom-what-would
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572527
What even is the free internet at this point? What are we losing? It’s all just television now.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television
I feel like one of the problems with “conservatism” (I’m using the term loosely here) is it fights to preserve the status quo, even if the status quo is already a bizzare compromise. If we want to envision a better future great, but preserving what we currently have as the “free internet” is just sad.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/03/05/population-growth-in-most-states-outpaced-long-term-trends-in-2024
Most population growth was due to immigration for a while, and immigration (for obvious reasons in 2025) is way, way down.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-us-population-could-shrink-in
what's your report?
>you'd have to nuke LA
Let's not give this administration ideas, please.
GLP-1s.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-does-it-seem-like-glp-1-drugs (Control-F "Theory 2: GLP-1 is a miraculous “moderation molecule,” and it has docking portals all throughout the body that reduce inflammation.")
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/do-glp-1-drugs-reduce-inflammation