Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We got a double header

today. The news out of Los Angeles is just so horrifying. We've added Liz Weil, who's been

reporting on California fires for years to segment two. So stick around for that.

But first, he's a staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the Work in Progress newsletter,

host to one of my favorite pods, plain English.

You can go subscribe to that now.

And he's got an upcoming book with Ezra Klein called Abundance.

You can pre-order now.

Maybe we'll have a three-way.

That was unintentional when that buck comes out,

but you never know. It's Derek Thompson. How you doing, brother? Tim, what a generous open.

Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Brother, I don't blow smoke. And so it's a generous intro because it's

true. It's a great pod. But we got a lot to get to. You have a cover story that we're here to talk about in the Atlantic Magazine about

solitude. And so I want to spend a bunch time on that and then a few other things you've been

writing about lately. I had this exclamation point in my notes as I was reading it. You wrote

study show Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021 when we didn't even have the vaccine all of

2021. We were forcibly at home in 2021, many of us for at least a few months. That is a pretty

alarming stat in an article that is filled with alarming stats. So talk to us just about the biggest

picture trajectory and what you are reporting

on. The big picture here is that this is a long, long, long article that really pivots around one

simple statistic, just one fact. And that fact is that Americans spend more time alone and less time

and face-to-face socializing than we ever have going back at least 60 years in official government data and maybe

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