Plain English with Derek Thompson

On his 40th birthday, Derek Thompson takes a step back and looks at how his thinking on the national debt has changed. Back when he first covered fiscal policy, concern about government borrowing was mostly a conservative position, with many liberals arguing it was overblown.

That’s starting to shift.

The U.S. now spends far more than it brings in, and the gap is still growing. For the first time, interest payments on the debt have surpassed military spending. And deficits that once rose during crises like the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic haven’t really come back down.

So what changed, and how worried should we be?

Derek is joined by economist Justin Wolfers to walk through the basics of the federal budget, the evolving debate around the national debt, and why more economists are starting to take persistent deficits seriously.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Justin Wolfers

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Fertility rates are collapsing around the world. In rich countries and poor ones, in secular societies and religious ones, people are having fewer children than ever before. Some explanations focus on economic factors like housing costs, childcare costs, and student debt. Others point to a harder-to-measure, broader sense of uncertainty about the future.

At the same time, economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde thinks we are underestimating how big a deal this really is. In his view, only two forces will truly shape the future of human history in this century: artificial intelligence and fertility, and changes are already underway.

Today, Fernández-Villaverde joins Derek to talk about the global fertility decline, why it is happening across so many different societies, and why he believes this shift could reshape economics, culture, and the future of civilization.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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For the past few years, Silicon Valley executives and economists have warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out millions of jobs. Some companies have even blamed AI for layoffs. But what if the AI job apocalypse isn’t actually happening?

Today, Derek talks to economist Alex Imas about the growing gap between the rhetoric around AI-related job loss and the facts. Despite widespread fears of mass unemployment, surveys show most executives expect AI to create jobs or have little impact on hiring. Even employment in software engineering (one of the fields thought to be most vulnerable to AI) continues to grow.

Derek and Alex discuss why automation fears persist despite contradictory evidence, the history of technological disruption, and why AI may not be destroying work as much as it is simply redirecting us toward entirely new industries and opportunities.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Alex Imas

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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America is richer than ever. Unemployment is low. Wages are high. According to traditional metrics, the economy looks strong. So why are Americans feeling so bad?

Today, Derek talks with bestselling author Morgan Housel and journalist David Wallace-Wells about what Derek calls the “Tragic Twenties”: the strange and sudden collapse in American happiness that began during COVID and never really stopped.

What's behind the country’s emotional downturn? Inflation and the lingering psychological effects of the pandemic are certainly part of the story. But so are collapsing trust in institutions, rising social isolation, the negativity feedback loop of social media, and the feeling that we’re living through one crisis after another. Derek, Morgan, and David unpack why the wealthiest society in history still feels deeply adrift and what this happiness recession says about the future of American life.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Morgan Housel and Derek Wallace-Wells
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

Links: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-get-so

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Hard to detect and almost impossible to treat, pancreatic cancer has long been one of medicine’s most ruthless killers. For decades, it’s been the cancer that science couldn’t crack. But that might be starting to change.

Recently, cancer researchers have announced a series of breakthroughs that, taken together, sound almost too good to be true: a drug that targets the “undruggable” gene behind most pancreatic tumors, a personalized mRNA vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognize pancreatic cancer as an enemy, and, now, an AI program that can spot the elusive disease years before doctors typically find it.

So is this breakthrough a real turning point? Or another case of medical hype outrunning reality?

On today’s episode, Dr. Ajit Goenka of the Mayo Clinic joins Derek to walk through the science behind the latest advances in cancer detection and what they could mean for the future of health care. They discuss Dr. Goenka’s new research using artificial intelligence to detect pancreatic cancer earlier than ever before … and whether machines might soon see what doctors can’t.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Dr. Ajit Goenka

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Freedom is one of the few ideas everyone agrees on. Surely more choice and autonomy is a good thing, right? But what if our endless pursuit of freedom is actually making us more anxious, less creative, and holding us back from reaching our full potential?
Today, Derek Thompson talks with bestselling author David Epstein about the surprising upside of constraints. After arguing for breadth in 'Range,' Epstein’s new book, 'Inside the Box,' makes the opposite case: that limits and rules can actually unlock creativity and satisfaction. They explore why more options don’t always make us happier, and how too many possibilities can lead to paralysis.
As Søren Kierkegaard warned, anxiety may be the price of too much freedom. It’s the dizziness that comes from keeping every option open. So in a world obsessed with maximizing choice and opening doors, this episode makes the case for something radical: closing some.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: David Epstein

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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For nearly a decade, critics have predicted that this would be the moment Trumpism finally fractures - January 6, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, endless internal feuds, even Trump’s online beef with Pope Leo. And yet the movement endures. Derek is joined by Ross Douthat to unpack the contradictory coalition Trump has built: Christian conservatives who overlook increasingly pagan behavior, anti-establishment populists who embrace strongman bullying, MAHA health obsessives that ignore their leader's diet of exclusively processed food … What holds this movement together and could the Iran War finally tear it apart?

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Ross Douthat

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Hollywood is in the middle of a triple crisis. You can measure it in tickets, jobs, and ideas.

Start with tickets. The best year for the movie business this century was 2002, when Americans and Canadians bought 1.6 billion tickets, or about five per person. Last year, Americans bought half that number. Eighty years ago, the typical American went to the movies twice a month. Now they go about twice a year.

Then there are the jobs. Studios are making fewer movies and shows than they did just a few years ago, and the projects they green-light are increasingly shot overseas, where governments hand out generous subsidies. According to The Wall Street Journal, employment in Hollywood has fallen 30 percent since 2022 across the hundreds of trades—actors, carpenters—that make film and television possible.

And then there's the creativity problem. It's not just that studios keep reheating 20th-century IP. The stars are getting older, too. Among the 14 most important movie stars of this decade, the average age is 57. Half are over 60. None is under 45. Even many of Gen Z's favorite movie stars—the Rock, Ryan Reynolds, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington—had hit films before Gen Z was born.

Today's guest is Sean Fennessey, host of The Ringer's The Big Picture and author of the new Substack Projections. In an essay published this week, Sean argues that all the gloom is missing something real: Attendance is perking up, young stars are breaking through, and the auteurs we've followed for 20 years are ascending to the center of the culture. Today, Sean and Derek talk about the new rules of Hollywood and what they tell us about the changing winds of American culture.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Sean Fennessey

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced an AI model so capable and so dangerous that it decided not to release it to the public.

The model, codenamed Mythos, could autonomously infiltrate computer systems around the world, exploit security vulnerabilities, conceal its own reasoning, and fabricate false explanations for what it was doing. Anthropic instead shared it with a small consortium of companies to help them find their own cybersecurity flaws.

You could be forgiven for some skepticism. Is this a genuine safety call, or Anthropic’s way of marketing its own power? But independent benchmarks suggest Mythos is real: On the Epoch Capabilities Index, which aggregates 40 separate AI evaluations, it represents the biggest single leap in model performance in three years.

That story is one of two major phase shifts happening simultaneously in AI right now. The first: from racing to release, to treating your own product as too dangerous to publish. The second: from a story about demand scarcity—is anyone actually paying for this stuff?—to supply scarcity, where companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on AI agents and the hyperscalers still can’t keep up.

Today’s guest is New York Times columnist and Hard Fork co-host Kevin Roose. We talk about Mythos, China, the road to AGI, and why the last few weeks might be the most consequential month in AI since the release of ChatGPT.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Kevin Roose

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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The two biggest stories in the world right now—the war involving Iran and the rise of artificial intelligence—are, at their core, the same story: energy. The Iran conflict has become a war of competing energy blockades, with Iran squeezing American allies and America squeezing Iran. And AI is its own energy arms race, with tech companies scrambling not just for customers but for supply—chips, electricity, and data center capacity. What does it mean when every major story leads back to energy? Derek talks with energy analyst Nat Bullard about a world where power, in every sense of the word, is the thing everyone is fighting over.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Nat Bullard

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Link: https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

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Something weird is going on with the elevated unemployment rate for young people today, but no one knows what exactly it is.

For the last year, as the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has crept up ominously, one of the questions I’ve reported more deeply than any other is: Is AI replacing young workers’ jobs? To make a long story short: I initially thought yes, then some economists convinced me the answer was no, then some other economists convinced me the answer was yes, then some other people convinced me the answer was no. Clear as mud.

Today’s guest is Rogé Karma. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics. We talk about the labor market for new hires, why young college graduates are so miserable, and why economic vibes are worth paying attention to, even if the official statistics are pointing in another direction.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Rogé Karma

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links:
https://www.theatlantic.com/category/work-progress/
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/04/job-market-artificial-intelligence/686659/

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Perhaps you’ve heard the news: The U.S. is experiencing a religious revival, and it’s concentrated among young people, who are flocking back to the fold. The Economist announced that “the West has stopped losing its religion.” The Washington Post declared that “Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.”

This is shocking news. Since the 1990s, the share of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation has been skyrocketing. A reversal would be historic.

But today’s guest, Ryan Burge, tells us that the secular pause in America is much stranger than it looks. Ryan is the author of the sensational Substack Graphs About Religion, which is full of beautiful graphs about religion. So today’s episode will be a little special for folks on YouTube and Spotify. You’ll be able to see the beautiful graphs that Ryan makes that really hammer home his deepest conclusions.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Ryan Burge

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links: Practically this entire episode is inspired by the work on Ryan’s amazing Substack. You can subscribe here.

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The 1970s oil crisis changed the world in ways that many people forget today, from the transformation of American politics to the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. The Iran war of 2026 could have similarly global consequences, from the rise of China to changes in the future of war to the acceleration of the global renewables transition. Today, Australian investor and writer Alex Turnbull joins the show to discuss the most important and most surprising second-order effects of the war.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Alex Turnbull

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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One of the themes we’ve circled in the last few weeks is the way that the modern world can hijack our values. This principle was recently articulated by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in an episode called "How Metrics Make Us Miserable." Thi told us that he became a philosopher to answer the biggest questions in life but discovered, in grad school, that everybody around him mostly cared about numbers. Journals were ranked by status: numbers. The university departments were ranked by status: more numbers. Individual researchers had their own h-scores and other public quantifications of prestige: numbers, numbers, and numbers. And this cult of quantification completely took over his life. The internal value of “I want to answer the world’s deepest questions” becomes replaced by the external value of “make number go up.”

What do we call this extraordinary force for bulldozing our values, and replacing them with something outside of us—synthetic, bureaucratic, inauthentic? Let’s call it the machine. If you become a philosopher to discover the meaning of life but only work on the papers that you think will end up in journals scored highly by a bureaucracy you’ll never see … that’s the machine. If you’re a podcaster who wants to answer the most compelling questions in the world but ends up just focusing on rage-bait political news because that’s what YouTube fingers are clicking on, that’s the machine.

What’s the opposite of the machine? It’s something a little different than success. It’s success plus the ability to hold our values in the face of external systems that try to crush them. Today’s guest Brad Stulberg calls it: excellence. Today's podcast is about excellence.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Brad Stulberg

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links: The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg

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Today’s podcast is an interview with one of the cofounders of the AI company Anthropic, Jack Clark. One thing I’m trying to do with the subject of artificial intelligence is offer a balance of perspectives on an issue that tends to receive mostly one-sided coverage. Some people are certain that AI is a bubble; some are certain it is not. Some are certain that AI will destroy millions of jobs; some are certain that it will not. I want listeners of this show to feel like every time they hear an intelligent take on one side of this issue, the next episode they’ll hear a countervailing take. Two weeks ago, you heard the investor and writer Paul Kedrosky argue that AI was an economic bubble.

But if any single data point pierces that narrative, it’s this. From December 2025 to this month, March 2026, Anthropic has more than doubled its annual recurring revenue, from $9 billion to nearly $20 billion. According to several analysts, there is no record of any company growing this fast at this scale.

Now, I don’t need Jack Clark or anybody at Anthropic to read me a corporate statement about the company’s revenue growth. I can read that myself. What I wanted to do today is ask questions that only someone in Jack’s position can answer.

If Anthropic’s executives believe that AI might be as dangerous as nuclear weapons, what right does any private business have to build this sort of thing for profit?

How does the company balance its reputation as the industry leader in caution and safety with its other reputation as one of the fastest developers of this technology?

And if artificial intelligence has the capacity to produce a country of geniuses in a data center—as Anthropic’s CEO insists—why do Americans overall say they disapprove of artificial intelligence more than just about every other institution and individual in the world?

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Jack Clark

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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If you're a typical worker with a salary, you have almost no control over how much tax you owe. But if you own a company worth billions of dollars, the income tax is, in the words of my guest today, "largely optional." Countries around the world struggle to get billionaires to pay a higher tax rate than middle-income families.

Gabriel Zucman is one of the world's leading experts on tax inequality, the economist who first rigorously measured what U.S. billionaires actually pay—and he found that it's less, as a share of income, than what a middle-class American pays. He's advised Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on wealth tax proposals and recently published sweeping new research showing that the problem is global. Today, we get into the mechanics of billionaire tax avoidance, the history of failed wealth taxes, and whether the AI era is about to make all of this dramatically worse.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Gabriel Zucman

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In 2017, Americans legally bet about $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to $160 billion. Gambling hasn’t just taken over sports. It’s invaded culture, politics, and even international warfare. Bettors have already made millions of dollars wagering on the precise dates and locations of bombing campaigns in Iran, and journalists have been hounded for reporting on events that can lose bettors money.

It’s one thing to believe, as I do, that it would be foolish to entirely ban sports gambling in the U.S. It’s another to watch the warp-speed casino-ification of American life and not think, “Something has gone badly wrong here!” McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, joins the show to discuss his new cover story on how gambling conquered sports … and everything else.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: McKay Coppins

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-betting-app-addiction/686061/

Source for all photos: Getty Images

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The AI buildout continues to break records, as the hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions of dollars into chips and data centers, even as investors punish their stock prices. But the revenue side of the ledger is showing signs of takeoff. In the last few weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have added billions of dollars of cash, on their way to becoming two of the fastest growing companies in history.

Last year, Derek was convinced that AI was on its way to being one of the biggest bubbles in modern capitalism’s history. But the torpid rise of AI agents is starting to change his mind. So he wanted to bring someone on to test his evolving theory.

The investor and writer Paul Kedrosky returns to the show to make his own case even more firmly: AI is a bubble, and the evidence is all around us.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson

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Check out Paul's podcast 'The Nick, Dick and Paul Show' on YouTube and Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/@nickdickpaul

https://open.spotify.com/show/6mxUS2hFE2hdaNx1sjhdYu?si=67add32695c546bf

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Paul Kedrosky

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Why do placebo effects work, even when patients know that they're taking a sugar pill? How do "nocebo" effects work, and why do some people hold onto beliefs that they suspect might bring them pain and suffering? What do the major world religions have to teach secular athletes and workers about the power of belief, and what does the psychological research tell us about the benefits of prayer, even for those who don't believe in God? Nir Eyal, bestselling author of the new book Beyond Belief, joins the show to talk about the research behind how our beliefs shape our lives.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Nir Eyal

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Today’s open is adapted from Derek’s Substack essay “If Placebos Work So Well, Why Not Prescribe Sugar Pills For Everything?”

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The Strait of Hormuz is the tiny bottleneck that could destabilize the global economy. As a critical passageway for crude oil, natural gas, and critical inputs for fertilizer, computer chips, and plastic, this small stretch of water is a tiny chokepoint for global trade, and the war in Iran has all but shut it down. What does this mean for the U.S. economy and other countries around the world?  Geopolitical analyst Rachel Ziemba joins the show to discuss.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Rachel Ziemba

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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What happens when the two biggest stories in the world—the Trump White House and the development of advanced artificial intelligence—collide? Well, nothing good, apparently. When contract negotiations broke down between the Pentagon and Anthropic, a leading AI lab, the Department of War took the extraordinary step of labeling Anthropic a "supply chain risk," a designation typically reserved for Chinese companies suspected of spying on American technology.

It’s not just liberals like me that found this announcement jarring. The technology writer Dean Ball—who served as Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House as recently as last summer—said the decision amounted to a nearly tyrannical attack on private property. (After all, if the government can walk up to your company, make you a deal, and destroy your company if you say no, that certainly sounds like a world in which the state can destroy whatever it trains its eyes on.)

So, I wanted to talk to Dean about what he sees—and why he thinks this episode is so important, and so terrifying. Today, we talk about the difference between Biden and Trump’s approach to artificial intelligence before diving into the Anthropic mess, and pulling out of it the bigger story, according to Dean: that Trump’s scattershot AI policy is just the latest sign that AI’s capabilities are growing faster than many people want to admit—this technology is going somewhere fast, and the the American government simply is not prepared for where it’s taking us.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Dean Ball

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Donald Trump’s polling has continued to edge down week after week. And yet approval of the Democratic Party is still stuck near its all-time low, according to Gallup and other surveys.

One interpretation of these polls is that the deep unpopularity of the party is an albatross around the neck of Democratic candidates. But there’s another interpretation that I think is more interesting—and perhaps more true. The fact that the party has no clearly defined national leader, and no clearly defined “brand” (sorry), is an opportunity for young Democrats to define themselves as individuals. Rather than act like a congregation all singing from the same hymnal, they can experiment, disagree, and adapt their message to their electorate. And that might ultimately prove to be a strength of the party heading into the 2026 midterms rather than a weakness.

Senator Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) joins the show to talk about the Iran war, immigration, affordability vs. aspiration, and the future of the Democratic Party.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Ruben Gallego
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Dramatic regime change. Moderate regime evolution. A calamitous regional conflict. Or … no change at all. Today we consider how the Iran conflict might evolve following the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei with Karim Sadjadpour, an American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Karim Sadjadpour
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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The modern world swims in numbers: work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics, social media metrics. Sometimes the quantification of life can make things better. But very often, I think they force us to play the games we can measure rather than the games we value. The quantified life has become a modern religion: a system of values that takes us over and keeps us from living the life we want.

Today’s guest is the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. He is the author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. We talk about metrics, the games of life, and how to listen to the parts of ourselves that cannot be reduced to numbers.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: C. Thi Nguyen

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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The GLP-1 drug revolution has taken the medicine world by storm. I’ve done several episodes on the science of GLP-1s. But we’ve never done an episode like this before, where we talk to one of the most important people in charge of guiding the GLP-1 drug revolution.

Our guest is Dave Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. First we talk about what makes the GLP-1 drug category special and the science that Lilly is doing to improve these drugs. Then, we talk about the pharmaceutical industry more broadly. How it works. How it could work better. And I don’t shy away from the question that I think Pharma CEOs need to take much more seriously: If the pharmaceutical industry is theoretically more devoted than any other economic category to saving people’s lives, why do Americans distrust it more than any other industry in the entire economy?

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: David Ricks
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Donald Trump suffered a huge blow Friday when the Supreme Court struck down the centerpiece of his economic policy: his vast system of tariffs. So, what happens now? Harvard’s Jason Furman explains the implications for the U.S. economy, consumers, global trade, and Trump’s strategy of centralizing power in the executive branch and using trade policy as a means of wringing concessions out of other counties.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Jason Furman
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In the mid-20th century, a group of media and communications scholars proposed that the shift from spoken to written language—from orality to literacy—transformed our politics, our media, our social relations, and even our sense of consciousness. Today we’re undergoing another shift: from a literate culture to something stranger—a post-literate world awash in social media and digital communications in which oral traditions are making a comeback. Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, the cohost of the Odd Lots podcast, has called this one of the most important trends in the world. Today he explains how he got hooked on orality theory and why it’s the skeleton key that unlocks so many oddities of the modern world.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Joe Weisenthal

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In his epic cover story for The Atlantic this month, staff writer Josh Tyrangiel spoke to dozens of economists, workers, tech CEOs, and AI experts about the danger that artificial intelligence might pose to the labor force. Is AI developing the capacity to automate and even replace millions of white-collar jobs, as many technologists and some economists predict? Or is this a normal technology that, like previous generations of technology, will have a much slower effect on the workforce? We cover several scenarios before asking: Why does it seem like nobody in politics is paying close enough attention to this story?

Links: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/ai-economy-labor-market-transformation/685731/

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Josh Tyrangiel

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Hello! I’m back from paternity leave just in time to talk about the biggest media earthquake of the year (so far): the Washington Post meltdown. For decades, the Post was a journalistic gem with superior coverage of politics. Last week, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos decided to gut roughly a third of the staff after the paper lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the last few years.

Today’s guest is Jim VandeHei, the cofounder of Politico and Axios and a former Post reporter. We talk about the decades-long rise and fall of the Post before zooming out to talk about the most important changes in news media over the past 20 years, the secret of 21st-century media success, and the coming storm of AI.

To read more about Derek’s opening comments on how the future of the news industry is going back to past, check out his Atlantic article on the subject here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/post-advertising-future-media/578917/

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Jim VandeHei

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’ve been re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond, and today's episode marks the end of our "best of" series for this year! This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!
“What’s the Matter With America’s Food?” originally aired September 26, 2025.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst” originally aired September 23, 2025.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Paul Kedrosky
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in Common, According to a 25-Year Study” originally aired August 27th, 2025.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Dr. Sandra Weintraub
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“The Modern World Is Changing America’s Personality for the Worse” originally aired August 13, 2025.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: John Burn-Murdoch
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good for Everything, Should We All Be on Them?” originally aired September 16, 2025.If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: David D’Alessio and Randy Seeley
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“What Experts Really Think About Smartphones and Mental Health” originally aired June 4th, 2025.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Jay Van Bavel
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“How Gen Z Sees the World” originally aired March 12, 2025.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Kyla Scanlon
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“A Grand, Unified Theory of Why Americans Are So Unhealthy” originally aired June 18, 2025.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guests: David Kessler and Eric Topol

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“The Antisocial Century” originally aired January 10, 2025.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Nick Epley

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Throughout December and January, we’re going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the past year and beyond. This list includes interviews that really stuck with me and some others that you guys had tons of feedback and thoughts on … including this one!

“How to Be Happy and the Science of Cognitive Time Travel” originally aired August 9, 2024.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Laurie Santos

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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One of my favorite theories about the modern world is the idea that culture is "stuck." Whether the decline of ornamentation in modern architecture, or the fact that every corporate logo looks the same now, or the fact that Gen Z's favorite television was all made in the 1990s and 2000s, or the sequel fetish in Hollywood, or the theory that old music is eating new music on Spotify, the evidence of cultural stagnation abounds. But is there one grand theory that explains all of it? The psychologist and writer Adam Mastroianni thinks so. He joins Derek to discuss.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Adam Mastroianni

Producers: Devon Baroldi

Links:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-hidden-cause-of-cultural-stagnation
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartaria
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/america-innovation-film-science-business/620858/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/america-really-running-out-original-ideas/621055/
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/11/blank-space-book-excerpt-culture/685037/

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The University of California San Diego is one of the best public colleges in America. So it was fairly shocking when the school released a report on the steep decline in academic preparedness of its freshman. The number of incoming students in need of remedial math has surged in the past few years. These students did not fail high school math. Many of them got straight A's. Other colleges have seen similar trends: declining mathematical ability from students who aced their high school tests.

I think that there are several ways to frame the problem we’re looking at here. One is that American kids can’t do math: That’s the headline of a recent Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch. Another frame, as Kelsey Piper writes in the online magazine The Argument, is that grades have stopped meaning anything. I think that the full story is somewhere in between. The age of grade inflation is also the age of achievement deflation. We are giving more and more A's to students who are learning less and less.

There is a lot of talk these days about America moving into a postliterate future. One piece of evidence for this is declining test scores for literacy among students and adults. Fewer people talk about a post-numerate future. The problem here is bigger than UC San Diego. National assessments in the U.S. and even throughout the developed world show that people are getting worse at math. But why?

Today we have three guests to help us answer these questions. Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic, Kelsey Piper of The Argument, and Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University. We talk about plummeting math scores for American students, why it’s happening, and why it matters at a moment when carbon-based humans seem to be getting dumber at the very moment that silicon-based machines are getting smarter.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guests: Rose Horowitch, Kelsey Piper and Joshua Goodman

Producers: Devon Baroldi

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Many AI experts believe that some time in the next few years, we will build something close to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system that can do nearly all valuable cognitive work as well as or better than humans. What happens to jobs, wages, prices, and politics in that world?

To explore that question, Derek is joined by Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia and one of the leading thinkers on the economics of transformative AI. Before he focused on superintelligence, Anton studied financial crises and speculative booms, so he brings a rare mix of macroeconomic skepticism and technological optimism. They talk about quiet AGI versus loud AGI, Baumol’s cost disease, robots, mass unemployment, and what kinds of policies might prevent an “AGI Great Depression” and keep no American left behind.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Anton Korinek

Producers: Devon Baroldi

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Sometimes, the perfect guest to discuss your own writing is ... you. On this special crossover episode, I am interviewed by Ben Smith and Max Tani of Semafor's Mixed Signals podcast about my recent essay, "Everything Is Television." During our conversation, which you can also find on the Mixed Signals feed, we discuss TV, politics, the definition of charisma, and much more.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Hosts: Ben Smith and Max Tani

Guest: Derek Thompson

Listen to my episode on the Mixed Signals feed HERE.

You can find my essay "Everything is Television" HERE.

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Youth unemployment is rising. Hiring is freezing up. The housing market is a mess. How did things get so bad for young people in the economy? And are things as bad as they seem? Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson of the Animal Spirits podcast join the show to discuss.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guests: Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson

Producers: Devon Baroldi

Links: Is this the scariest chart in the world? https://www.derekthompson.org/p/is-this-the-new-scariest-chart-in

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This week was a straight flush for Democrats. Zohran Mamdani completed his heroic arc to become mayor of the world’s most important city. Democrats ran up huge margins in the big governor races in Virginia and New Jersey, where Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, respectively, won by double digits. What unified the three victories was the Democratic candidate’s ability to turn the affordability curse against the sitting president, transforming Republicans’ 2024 advantage into a 2025 albatross.

Affordability is the Democrats’ new watchword. And it’s a good one. It speaks to Americans' direct concerns. It’s a big-tent subject, allowing a democratic socialist to offer one message in South Brooklyn and a moderate Democrat to offer another message in southern Virginia.

Today’s guest is Matthew Yglesias, a writer whose site, Slow Boring, is a must-read for me and many others who follow politics and policy. We talk about the affordability theory of everything and its weaknesses, the Democrats’ big night, the lessons of Mamdani, persuasion, moderation, and much more.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Matthew Yglesias

Producers: Devon Baroldi

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Ken Burns—the award-winning filmmaker whose documentary films and television series on American history include 'The Civil War' (1990), 'Baseball' (1994), 'Jazz' (2001), and 'Country Music' (2019)—joins the show to talk about the American Revolution and the art of storytelling.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Ken Burns

Producers: Devon Baroldi

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Last week, an FBI investigation into gambling led to the arrest of several prominent basketball stars, raising questions about the state of legalized sports betting, which has enriched professional sports and sports media.

The problems with sports gambling extend far beyond the integrity of the game. A 2024 working paper from economists at UCLA, Harvard, and USC found that states that legalized sports gambling after the 2018 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court saw “a substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies. We also find that financial institutions respond to the reduced creditworthiness of consumers by restricting access to credit.” A separate analysis found that nearly one in five men aged 18-24 is on the spectrum of having a gambling problem.

There’s no question that sports betting has taken over sports. It’s all over ESPN, all over my favorite sports podcasts. This podcast is a part of The Ringer Podcast Network, which has close relationships with the sports book FanDuel and has several shows devoted to gambling. I listen to them. Quite a lot, actually.

It would be easier for me as the host of this episode if my position on gambling had the clarity of pure outrage. If I thought that gambling was a pure vice, a mere nuisance, and a total drag, I would say: Let’s just be done with it. On the opposite end, if I thought that legalized sports gambling posed no risk to bettors, didn’t threaten the integrity of professional sports, and represented an obvious improvement to the previous regime of black-market betting, I’d say: Ignore these moralizing bozos and place your 15-part parlay.

The trouble is that I don’t have the advantage of clear outrage on this issue. I think that sports gambling is fun. And I think that it threatens the integrity of professional sports. And I think that it ruins some people’s lives.

Today’s guest is Jonathan Cohen, the author of 'Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.' Like me, Jon is worried about the effect that legal sports gambling is having. Also like me, he sometimes bets on sports. Also like me, he listens to Ringer podcasts.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Jonathan Cohen

Producers: Devon Baroldi

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Bestselling author Michael Lewis joins the show to talk about how bubbles happen, the legacy of 'The Big Short' and the global financial crisis, 'Moneyball' and how the data analytics revolution conquered sports and entertainment, the difference between being a good investor and being a good investigative journalist, and the craft of writing.

Listen to the new audiobook of Michael's hit 'The Big Short' ⁠HERE⁠!

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Michael Lewis

Producers: Devon Baroldi and Kaya McMullen

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Today’s guest is Ethan Mollick. Ethan is a professor of management at Wharton, where he specializes in entrepreneurship and innovation. He is the author of the book 'Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI,' and his Substack, One Useful Thing, is the single most useful guide I have ever found to make sense of these tools and use them productively. But he’s also a deep thinker of the Alfred Chandler school of big ideas who wants to not only help individuals use the technology more efficiently but also understand what happens as tens of millions and billions of people use the technology to make themselves more productive or even, at times, obsolete.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Ethan Mollick
Producers: Devon Baroldi and Devon Renaldo

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By some measures, the Democratic Party has never been so unpopular as a political brand. While this fact obviously reflects some difficult realities for the party, it also creates an opportunity for Democrats to redefine what the party stands for. Derek talks to Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss about his idea for a digital dopamine tax, the art of politics in an attention economy, why moderate Democrats don't have big bold ideas, Derek's two-party theory for political success in America, and more.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Jake Auchincloss
Producers: Devon Baroldi and Devon Renaldo

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