Plain English with Derek Thompson
Episodes
Plain English BEST OF: A Grand, Unified Theory of Why Americans Are So Unhealthy
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 interview...
Plain English BEST OF: The Antisocial Century
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 interview...
Plain English BEST OF: How to Be Happy and the Science of Cognitive Time Travel
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 interview...
A Grand Unified Theory of Cultural Stagnation
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of my favorite theories about the modern world is the idea that culture is "stuck." Whether the decline of ornamentation in modern architecture, o...
The American Math Crisis
21 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
How Superintelligent AI Could Upend Work and Politics
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ca...
Everything Is Television
14 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Are Young People Screwed?
12 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The Democrats Have a New Winning Formula
07 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
How the American Revolution Changed the World, With Ken Burns
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ken Burns—the award-winning filmmaker whose documentary films and television series on American history include 'The Civil War' (1990), 'Baseball' (...
The Problem With Sports Gambling
31 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, an FBI investigation into gambling led to the arrest of several prominent basketball stars, raising questions about the state of legalized ...
Michael Lewis on How the Global Financial Crisis Explains Trump, Crypto, and Everything Else
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
What Happens When AI Learns to Do Our Jobs
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest is Ethan Mollick. Ethan is a professor of management at Wharton, where he specializes in entrepreneurship and innovation. He is the au...
How Democrats Lost the Future
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
By some measures, the Democratic Party has never been so unpopular as a political brand. While this fact obviously reflects some difficult realities f...
Everybody Thinks AI Is a Bubble. What If They’re Wrong?
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 l...
The Future of Entertainment, Part 2: What’s the Matter With Broadway?
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The Future of Entertainment, Part 1: Is Hollywood's Business Model Broken?
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Why Money Doesn't Buy Happiness in America
07 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
America is rich—richer than ever. Yet Americans are more anxious, lonelier, and less satisfied than people in many poorer nations. The 2025 World Ha...
Is AI Really About to Solve Human Disease?
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I’ve had the privilege of talking to many brilliant people about artificial intelligence. And when you ask them to imagine the most beneficial conse...
How America Became a Nation of "Free Speech Hypocrites"
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 come...
What’s the Matter With America’s Food?
26 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 pol...
This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This year, American tech companies will spend $300 billion to $400 billion on artificial intelligence, which is in nominal dollars more than any group...
The Jimmy Kimmel Saga and America's Free-Speech Crisis
19 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 pun...
If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good for Everything, Should We All Be on Them?
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Charlie Kirk's Killing and America's Age of "Salad-Bar Extremism"
12 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Th...
America in the Age of Diagnosis
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
America is sicker than ever. That’s what the data says, anyway. Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses have soared. Between the 1990s and the mid-...
Trumponomics Explained, Part 2: The Enshittification of American Power
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Hop...
What Is Trumponomics? Part 1: How Donald Trump Is Breaking American Capitalism
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 as...
The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in Common, According to a 25-Year Study
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 m...
Plain History: How the Transcontinental Railroads Built the Modern World
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 infrast...
The Modern World Is Changing America’s Personality For the Worse
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
According to analysis by Financial Times writer John Burn-Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to Americans’ personalities in the last de...
Will AI Usher In the End of Deep Thinking?
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest GDP report. It contained a startling detail. Spending on artificial intelligence added...
The New Geography of Housing in America
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Subscribe to Derek’s new Substack. In 1991, the median age of first-time homebuyers was 28. Now it’s 38, an all-time high. In 1981, the median a...
The Demise of Late-Night TV Is an Omen for American Culture
23 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Even before the cancellation of 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,' the business of comedy was changing rapidly. Twenty years ago, comedians aspired...
If Trump’s Economic Ideas Are So Bad, Why Isn’t the U.S. Economy Doing Much Worse?
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sign up for Derek's Substack here. Harvard economist Jason Furman returns to the show to answer two big, burning questions. First, if Trump's economi...
Fertility Needs a Scientific Revolution
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Couples are having kids much later in their lives. As young people spend more of their 20s and 30s getting established in their careers, and marriage ...
The Mysterious Rise of Major Injuries in Professional Sports
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sign up for the Derek Thompson newsletter. In Game 7 of this year's NBA Finals, Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles in the first...
How Abundance Won in California
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The California housing crisis is a disaster and an emergency. Housing construction per capita has steadily fallen in the last few decades, while home ...
What's Next for the Middle East: War, Peace, or Revolution?
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sign up for Derek Thompson's Substack here! Donald Trump rose to power in the Republican Party as a critic of the neoconservative tradition and was o...
NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani on Abundance, Socialism, and How to Change a Mind
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before today’s show, a personal announcement. After almost 17 years at The Atlantic, I have just officially moved my writing full time to Substack, ...
A Grand, Unified Theory of Why Americans Are So Unhealthy
18 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Americans are unusually overweight and chronically ill compared to similarly rich countries. This episode presents a grand, unified theory for why tha...
Why Are Americans So Unhealthy? Part I: Is Ultra-Processed Food Killing Us?
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Americans die younger and faster than the residents of almost every other rich country. Why? There's gun violence, drug overdoses, and car crashes. Yo...
What Experts Really Think About Smartphones and Mental Health
04 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I'm very concerned about the relationship between smartphone use and America's mental health crisis. But many researchers don't see things my way. The...
Plain History: How Adolf Hitler Destroyed German Democracy in Six Months
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In November 1932, Germany was a republic. By the spring of 1933, it was a dictatorship. How did it all happen so quickly? Fascination with Adolf Hitl...
Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Is Great for the "Stealthy Wealthy"
28 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The tax and spending bill passed by House Republicans last week is the sort of bill that does so many different things that even budget experts coul...
The Gene-Editing Breakthrough That Saved a Baby’s Life
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last year, Kyle and Nicole Muldoon welcomed their baby KJ into the world. Almost immediately, doctors realized something was wrong. KJ had been born w...
The Rules of Attraction and the Psychology of Romance
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Psychology is hard, even when you’re just trying to understand what’s going on with one impossibly complex person. Romance psychology is particula...
Plain History: How Norman Borlaug Stopped the Apocalypse
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In every generation, important people predict that the end is near and the apocalypse is coming. In the 1960s, the fear was that population growth wou...
Why Do Americans Pay So Much for Drugs?
13 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling drugmakers to slash the prices of their medicines. Once again, the president sh...
Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever?
09 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In music, billion-dollar investments in old catalogues are squeezing out new music. In film, Hollywood has become addicted to the regurgitation of fam...
The Job Market for Young Grads Is Flashing Red
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last month, the unemployment rate for recent college grads surged to nearly 6 percent. Compared to the overall economy's jobless rate, the unemploymen...
Megapod: The Crisis in American Science
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, we are witnessing an unprecedented assault on American science. Thousands of workers have been dismissed from the National Institutes of Health...
Is This the Chinese Century?
29 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the last few weeks, for the first time in my life, I’ve seriously thought about the 21st century not being another American century. A recent e...
What Americans Get Wrong About ADHD
25 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1937, a Rhode Island psychiatrist named Charles Bradley ran an experiment on 30 child patients who had complained of headaches. He gave them an amp...
An Astrophysicist Explains the "Strongest Evidence Yet" of Alien Life
22 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, a team of astrophysicists from the University of Cambridge announced that they had discovered the “strongest indication” ever of extrat...
A Toy Manufacturer Explains How Trump’s Tariffs Could Crush His Industry
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the past three weeks, we've spoken to economists about the tariffs. We’ve spoken to a historian about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the 100-yea...
Why America Will Lose Its Trade War With China
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. is in the opening innings of a full-blown trade war with China. What does that actually mean? What do we sell to China? What does China sell ...
Plain History: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression
11 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 1920s and the 2020s share a special kinship. One hundred years ago, the U.S. was grappling with a mix of growth, technological splendor, and gener...
Trump’s Trade War Is Like Nothing America’s Ever Seen
08 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Trump's tariff plan has set global markets on fire. What are they for? What are they trying to accomplish? Fresh off his black-out-rage sessi...
Trump’s Plan to Smash the Global Economic Order
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Trump's second term has been a breakneck whirlwind: tariffs announced, tariffs unannounced, tariffs reannounced, allies threatened, and global ...
Plain History: The Gilded Age
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Corruption. Class wars. Technological splendor. The dawn of a new age of business and government. Rockefeller and Carnegie. The Gilded Age in America—...
ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Trump is serving up a scarcity agenda to America. He and the White House say we don’t have an economy that works, so we might just need to ac...
How Gen Z Sees the World
12 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Generation Z, which was born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, has a unique economic, political, and cultural identity. In the 2024 election...
Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
07 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. C...
How AI Could Change the Future of Music
04 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright f...
The End of Reading
28 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scor...
'How Progressives Froze the American Dream' (Live)
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you had to describe the U.S. economy at the moment, I think you could do worse than the word stuck. The labor market is stuck. The low unemployme...
Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk
21 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who is the most successful president in American history? George Washington secured American independence. Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and end...
The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out
18 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For the past month, chaos and confusion have gripped Washington and the federal government. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or ...
Is There a Scientific Case for Believing in God?
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time. It's about the decline of religion in America, the value of faith, the case for belief, an...
Fraud, Scandal, and Failure in the Fight Against Alzheimer's Disease
11 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is it so hard to find a cure for Alzheimer’s? A simple answer is that the brain and its disorders are complicated. But as today’s guest, Charl...
The Energy Story of the Moment: The Unstoppable Rise of Solar Vs. the Unmovable Demand for Global Fossil Fuels
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Fans of green energy like me face some inconvenient truths about the global energy picture. First, coal sounds like a dirty technology that the rich w...
The 5 Types of Wealth
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wealth isn’t just about financial security, according to today’s guest, Sahil Bloom. It’s about time wealth (the freedom to control our own sche...
Are GLP-1 Drugs "the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of the 21st Century"?
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the past few years, we've learned that GLP-1 drugs don’t just help with diabetes or increase people’s feelings of fullness to help them lose we...
Tech Talk: AI Supremacy, TikTok’s Fate, and Crypto Decadence
24 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, tech talk with an old friend of the pod, Kevin Roose of The New York Times, who is also host of the 'Hard Fork' podcast. This is a show about ...
Plain History Volume 1: Who Killed President James Garfield?
21 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is the first episode of a little experiment we’re trying this year, a podcast within a podcast on history that we’re calling, simply enough, ...
What's the Truth About Alcohol, Cancer, and Your Health?
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today's episode has been a long time coming. For years, more scientists and health influencers have claimed that even moderate drinking does serious d...
The L.A. Fires: How They Happened, Climate Change’s Role, and What the City Must Do Now
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
With so many confusing narratives unfolding around a fire that is still raging out of control, I wanted to talk to somebody I knew and trusted to get ...
‘The Anti-Social Century’: America’s Epidemic of Solitude—and How to Fix It
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
My new feature for The Atlantic magazine is called "The Anti-Social Century." It's a long article that revolves around a simple point: Americans a...
The Big 2025 Economy Forecast: AI and Big Tech, Nuclear’s Renaissance, Trump vs. China, and What’s Eating Europe?
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Happy new year! And what better way to celebrate the freshly torn calendar page than by welcoming one of Derek's favorite writers to the show to tell ...
The Year's Biggest Breakthroughs in Science and Tech (Feat.: OK, But Seriously, What Is Quantum Computing?)
31 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our final episode of the year is also my favorite annual tradition: conversations with scientists about the most important and, often, just plain mind...
A Mysterious Health Wave Is Breaking Out Across the U.S.
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do Americans die younger than citizens of other rich countries? The most important reason is that life in America is inexcusably dangerous. The U....
The Productivity Paradox: Why Less Is More With Oliver Burkeman
20 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
So, here’s a scenario: It’s Monday. And you open up whatever calendar or planner or to-do list you use to organize the essential activities of the...
Why American Health Care Is a "Broken System"
13 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot to death outside a hotel in Manhattan by a young man motivated by rage at the insurance indust...
Is Crypto Entering a New Golden Age—or Just a New Era of Failed Promises?
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The crypto industry seems poised for a new golden age. But what exactly does that mean? Who would benefit? And, oh by the way, what does this technolo...
Megapod: Why Is There So Much BS in Psychology?
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the last decade, several major findings in social psychology have turned out to be hogwash—or, worse, even fraud. This has become widely known as...
Vaccine Conspiracies, Fluoride Myths, and America’s Broken Public-Health Discourse
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Emily Oster, professor of economics at Brown University, joins the show to talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his theories about fluoride and vaccines,...
The Self-Driving Revolution Is Real—and It Could Be Spectacular
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What would a world of self-driven cars look like? How would it change shopping, transportation, and life, more broadly? A decade ago, many people wer...
How Trump Won: Young Men’s Red Wave, the Blue-City Flop, and the Incumbency Graveyard
08 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Derek shares his big-picture theory for Trump's victory. Then, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson explains how Trump shifted practically the ...
How to Watch Election Night Without Falling for Conspiracy Theories or False Hope
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest (our final preelection guest) is David Wasserman, political analyst with the Cook Political Report, who also helps out with the NBC de...
This Small Pennsylvania Town Explains the 2024 Election
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, a close look at the history of a Pennsylvania town and how that history contains within it the story of the 2024 election. In September, Donald...
Why Is Every Recent Presidential Election So Close?
25 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
My favorite sort of social phenomenon is something that seems normal to modern eyes that is actually incredibly unusual. We take it for granted that e...
Is Radical Human Life Extension Possible?
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1900, the average US life expectancy was 47 years old. That's the current age of Tom Brady, Ryan Reynolds, and Shakira. But extraordinary advances ...
America's Young Men Are Falling Behind—and Shifting Right
11 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today: the state of men and what's really happening in the gender divide in politics. Many young men are falling behind economically and socially at t...
Is the Middle East on the Verge of All-Out War?
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Since October 7, 2023, many have feared that the conflict between Israel and Hamas would bloom into a wider war that would consume the Middle East. To...
The Surprising Science of Cynicism (Plus: The Policy Paradox of the 2024 Election)
27 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Derek shares his biggest frustrations about the 2024 election, like the lack of a policy debate and blind spots in news coverage and polling analysi...
A Sports Mystery: What Happened to the NFL Quarterback?
20 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, a mystery about what some people consider the most important position in sports: What the hell is going on with the NFL quarterback? We are two...
How AI Could Help Us Discover Miracle Drugs
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We may be on the cusp of a revolution in medicine, thanks to tools like AlphaFold, the technology for Google DeepMind, which helps scientists predict ...
The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories
06 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Are conspiracy theories more popular than ever? Are Americans more conspiratorial than ever? Are conservatives more conspiratorial than liberals? Jose...
"Exercise May Be the Single Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known"
30 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Exercise is a conundrum. On the one hand, physical activity is clearly one of the best interventions for preventing physical disease and mental suffer...