derek thompson is a staff writer at the atlantic and hosts the plain english podcast.h, derek, welcome. so let me start out by asking you the statistic everybody talks about when talking about american health care is we have the most expensive system in the world, and it delivers very bad outcomes that our life expectancy in particular looks very bad compared to, say, europe and japan. but you say that masks an important set of causes of death. explain what you mean. >> well, i think the american health care system has any number of problems. it's too expensive. there's too many uninsured people. but the reason why america has a shorter lifespan than similarly developed countries is that americans are more likely to die young. and the reason we're more likely to die young is because of really four factors cars, drugs, guns, and calories. we die in car accidents much more frequently than other rich countries. we have way more guns and have way more gun deaths. are drug overdose. deaths are higher than practically any other oecd country, and americans are also obese rela

joining us now, staff writer for the atlantic, derek thompson is here.at the table, new york times editorial board member and msnbc political analyst mara gay is here. derek, we've been talking about the piece. i've been talking about it since i read it, since i first saw it on social media. i saw it online. i saw it on instagram. take our viewers who may not have been through it yet, through the reporting at the beginning of it, the reporting that i think really pulls you in in restaurants, in movie theaters, in in sort of the things we touch every day. sure. >> so i was at a restaurant here in north carolina where i live with my wife and daughter, and we were there pretty early, like 445, 5:00. >> you know, our daughter is 17 months old. >> she has to be kind of early. there's no one in the restaurant. >> and i look at the bar of this restaurant and it's entirely filled with brown paper bags. >> and over the next half hour or 45 minutes, i'd say ten, 12 people walk into this restaurant, don't say a word to anybody, pick up a paper bag and leave the res

ism -- is a term coined by the journalist derek thompson, who is, you know, a fantastic writer and thinker about these big topics and the idea of work ism is that work has come to replace religion. in some ways it is a secular, secular religion where we derive our identity from work, where we forge our social ties from work, where our relationship ups and our our socialize, revolve around the office or the places where we do jobs. and it's a problem in a lot of ways because it's something that has come to replace friends and family and communities and really potent and really potent ways. if you look at there was a pew study not too long ago in 2023 that asked americans what the most fulfilling parts of life would be, what are components that make for a fulfilling life? and 71% of americans said a meaningful career is central to having a fulfilling life and that's all well and good. however, that ranked higher than getting married, having a family and close friendships. and so when a meaningful career outweighs all these other facets of life that are so important to us being socially engag