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PODCAST

Plain English with Derek Thompson

Longtime Atlantic tech, culture and political writer Derek Thompson cuts through all the noise surrounding the big questions and headlines that matter to you in his new podcast Plain English. Hear Derek and guests engage the news with clear viewpoints and memorable takeaways. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday, and if you"ve got a topic you want discussed, shoot us an email at plainenglish@spotify.com! You can also find us on tiktok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_

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All Episodes

54:45

The Problem With Sports Gambling

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/31

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

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72:03

Michael Lewis on How the Global Financial Crisis...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/28

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

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54:14

What Happens When AI Learns to Do Our Jobs

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/24

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

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59:48

How Democrats Lost the Future

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/21

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,

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52:07

Everybody Thinks AI Is a Bubble. What If They’re Wrong?

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/17

Two weeks ago, in one of our most popular podcasts of the year, the investor and author Paul Kedrosky explained why he thinks AI is a bubble. In the last few days, practically everybody seems to agree.I hate this. I don’t like feeling like my position is the same position as everybody else’s. Conventional wisdoms are often more conventional than wise, and I’ve started to wonder: Is there a bubble of people calling AI a bubble?Today’s guest says yes. Azeem Azhar is an investor and the author of the

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47:18

The Future of Entertainment, Part 2: What’s the...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/14

In the second episode of our two-part miniseries on the future of entertainment, Derek goes from Hollywood to NYC to understand why Broadway musicals are in trouble. "With the cost of staging song-and-dance spectacles skyrocketing and audiences drawn to older hits, none of the musicals that opened last season have made a profit," The New York Times recently reported.John Johnson, a major theater producer behind hits like 'Stereophonic' (the most Tony-nominated play in Broadway history) and George

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46:22

The Future of Entertainment, Part 1: Is Hollywood's...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/10

The film and TV business has quietly—or, if you work in the industry, not so quietly—been in a depression for the past few years. Original TV work has plummeted. In 2024, Americans bought about 40 percent fewer movie tickets than they did in 2019, the year before the pandemic. The number of people employed in the motion picture industry in L.A. County has also declined by 40 percent. Those are catastrophic figures.Few people have done more to shape my understanding of these developments than Ben

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48:38

Why Money Doesn't Buy Happiness in America

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/07

America is rich—richer than ever. Yet Americans are more anxious, lonelier, and less satisfied than people in many poorer nations. The 2025 World Happiness Report ranked the U.S. 24th in life satisfaction, its lowest on record. Maybe, as social scientists say, we’ve traded community for consumption. Today’s guest, Morgan Housel, thinks there’s a deeper reason money hasn’t bought us happiness. America, he says, is world-class at making money, but bad at spending it wisely. In his new book, The Art of

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53:41

Is AI Really About to Solve Human Disease?

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/10/03

I’ve had the privilege of talking to many brilliant people about artificial intelligence. And when you ask them to imagine the most beneficial consequences of this technology, they almost always give the same answer: medicine. The dream is dazzling. Superintelligent AI will cure stubborn diseases and disorders—cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s. It will diagnose all our illnesses, design new lifesaving drugs, accelerate clinical trials, and pair with wearables to fight chronic illness and extend our

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52:18

How America Became a Nation of "Free Speech Hypocrites"

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/30

The past few weeks have marked a low point for free speech principles in America. The head of the FCC openly threatened ABC for the language of a comedian. The president told a reporter that networks that are "against" him should have their licenses revoked. The vice president went on TV and told Americans to turn in their colleagues if they spoke ill of Charlie Kirk. And many have. After Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University, posted that “if you think Charlie Kirk

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52:32

What’s the Matter With America’s Food?

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/26

In the past few weeks, we’ve done several episodes on obesity, GLP-1 drugs, and nutrition science. What we haven’t talked about as much is the politics of food.And today’s guests say: If you really want to understand why Americans are so unhealthy, you have to see that the problem is not just our willpower, and it’s not just our food itself. It’s our food policies. Kevin Hall was a former top nutrition researcher at the NIH who retired after accusing RFK Jr. and the Department of Health and Human

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59:26

This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/23

This year, American tech companies will spend $300 billion to $400 billion on artificial intelligence, which is in nominal dollars more than any group of companies have ever spent to do anything. Notably, these companies are not remotely close to earning $400 billion on artificial intelligence.That's why you’re starting to hear some people wonder if the AI build-out is turning into the mother of all economic bubbles. The prospect of an AI bubble should scare us. Roughly half of last quarter's GDP

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40:51

The Jimmy Kimmel Saga and America's Free-Speech Crisis

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/19

Matt Belloni, the host of the Town podcast and the author of Puck’s 'What I’m Hearing' newsletter, joins the show to talk about Jimmy Kimmel's punishment, what happened behind the scenes at ABC and Disney, Bob Iger's legacy, and what this means at a moment when media companies are bending the knee to the Trump administration, which is clearly using its position to punish free speech despite rising to power by promising to do the opposite.If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future

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54:22

If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good for Everything, Should We All...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/16

To read more of Derek's reporting on GLP-1 drugs, you can subscribe to his Substack here.GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound don't just help with Type 2 diabetes and weight loss. They seem to curb alcohol, cocaine, and tobacco use among addicts. In some studies, they prevent strokes, heart attacks, chronic kidney disease, sleep apnea, and Parkinson's disease. They’re associated with a lower risk of several cancers, including pancreatic cancer and multiple myeloma. Arthritic patients on the

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52:15

Charlie Kirk's Killing and America's Age of...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/12

In the past few years, we have witnessed a frightening spiral of political violence. We’ve seen the killing of Charlie Kirk; the killing of Brian Thompson, the health insurance executive; the assassination of a Minnesota House Speaker and her husband; the shooting of a Minnesota state senator and his wife; several attempted assassinations of Donald Trump; an attack on Nancy Pelosi’s home and husband; a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer; and calls to lynch Vice President Mike

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57:07

America in the Age of Diagnosis

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/09

America is sicker than ever. That’s what the data says, anyway.Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses have soared. Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, bipolar disorder among American youth grew by a factor of 40, while the number of children diagnosed with ADHD increased by a factor of 7. Rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression have soared, too. Perhaps in previous decades doctors missed millions of cases of illness that we’re now catching. Or perhaps, as the New York Times writer David Wallace

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52:08

Trumponomics Explained, Part 2: The Enshittification...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/05

In the second of our two-episode series on Donald Trump, economics, and power, we talk to Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins. Farrell has written extensively on how the United States has in the last few years weaponized its economic power to force other countries to do its bidding, through sanctions or the freezing of bank accounts. Today, we consider the many ways that Trump has weaponized the office of the presidency against American interests and how his

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49:33

What Is Trumponomics? Part 1: How Donald Trump Is...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/09/03

Today is the first of two interviews this week trying to answer this question: What is Trumponomics? From the 1980s to the 2010s, it was generally assumed that Republicans and Democrats had settled differences in economic policy. Republicans wanted lower taxes and less spending on welfare. Democrats wanted higher taxes and more social spending. Reality didn’t always conform to those differences. George H.W. Bush famously raised some taxes, and Bill Clinton famously reduced some welfare spending

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41:48

The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/08/27

Memory is the glue of life. Without it, our focus softens, our experience of the world blurs, and our identities melt away. But as people age, their memory declines. Many billions of dollars have been spent to understand the biological basis of dementia and to devise a cure. In most cases, they have failed spectacularly.But what if, rather than study the brains of people with advanced memory loss, we instead studied the brains of people with the opposite condition: extraordinary memory and brain

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55:49

Plain History: How the Transcontinental Railroads...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/08/20

Today’s pod is about the economic story of the moment. It’s about new technology that supporters claim will transform the U.S. economy, an infrastructure build-out unlike anything in living memory that demands enormous natural resources, fears that corporate giants are overbuilding something that can never return its investment, an uncomfortable closeness between corporations and the state, fears that oligarchs are screwing the public to generate unheard-of levels of private wealth.Just a small

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331 results

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