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_
Episodes
November 25, 2025 • 58 mins
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 i...
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November 21, 2025 • 54 mins
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 mathema...
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November 18, 2025 • 58 mins
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 eco...
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November 14, 2025 • 57 mins
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 ...
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November 12, 2025 • 52 mins
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
...
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November 7, 2025 • 60 mins
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 presiden...
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November 4, 2025 • 59 mins
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...
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October 31, 2025 • 54 mins
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 rulin...
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October 28, 2025 • 72 mins
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 questio...
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October 24, 2025 • 54 mins
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...
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October 21, 2025 • 59 mins
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 bol...
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October 17, 2025 • 52 mins
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...
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October 14, 2025 • 47 mins
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 'Stereop...
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October 10, 2025 • 46 mins
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...
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October 7, 2025 • 48 mins
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 mak...
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October 3, 2025 • 53 mins
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 tr...
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September 30, 2025 • 52 mins
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 employe...
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September 26, 2025 • 52 mins
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 ...
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September 23, 2025 • 59 mins
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 prospec...
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September 19, 2025 • 40 mins
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 op...
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