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. Watch 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! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson
Episodes
June 26, 2026 • 53 mins
For decades, investors valued companies based on a familiar formula: Grow revenue, earn profits, and reward shareholders. But a new era may be beginning - one where trillion-dollar companies can lose billions of dollars a year and still command enormous valuations.
SpaceX recently became one of the world's most valuable public companies despite reporting multibillion-dollar losses. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic are also racing t...
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June 23, 2026 • 56 mins
Four months ago, the U.S. and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran. Supporters predicted a decisive victory that would curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and reshape the balance of power in the Middle East. Instead, the war became a costly stalemate. Iran's power continued, the conflict dragged on, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupted global energy markets, sending economic shockwaves around the world.
Now, a ce...
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June 19, 2026 • 68 mins
What is Donald Trump good at? In his second administration, he promised lower prices, stronger manufacturing, and an end to foreign conflicts. Instead, inflation has risen, blue-collar job growth has slowed, and the U.S. finds itself involved in another war in the Middle East. But there is one area where Trump has undeniably succeeded: increasing the wealth of the Trump family.
Even as his approval ratings have fallen, Trump and h...
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June 16, 2026 • 59 mins
For years, scientists worried that medical progress was slowing down. Drug development became more expensive than ever with more complex clinical trials, and even then, many new treatments offered only modest gains. But over the past month, a series of breakthroughs has raised hopes that medicine may be entering a new era.
Researchers unveiled a massively promising new therapy for pancreatic cancer, a gene-editing treatment that c...
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June 12, 2026 • 61 mins
Prior to the 1930s, old age in America often meant poverty. But thanks to Social Security, Medicare, medical advances, and rising asset prices, over the past 90 years, older Americans have become one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful groups in the country.
In his new book, 'Gerontocracy in America,' Samuel Moyn argues that this success has created a dangerous imbalance. He says America isn't just facing oligarchy, or...
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June 9, 2026 • 64 mins
Humans are unusual dads. Across the animal kingdom, dads are often absent from child-rearing altogether. But among humans, fatherhood takes many forms, and in the last half century, it has changed dramatically. College-educated American fathers now spend nearly four times as much time caring for their children as they did in the 1960s.
And according to new research, this new type of fatherhood doesn't just change a man's schedule ...
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June 5, 2026 • 56 mins
For generations, we've defined creativity by its products: the novel, the painting, the song, the breakthrough idea. We look at the work, and from the work we see the creator as “creative.” But AI is getting remarkably good at producing creative work. In some cases, experts now prefer AI-generated writing to work created by humans and can't reliably tell the difference between the two. In fact, a major literary prize ev...
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June 2, 2026 • 58 mins
Modern loneliness is often treated as a simple problem: People are simply spending more time alone. But what if that's not the whole story? Over the last several years, Derek has written about workism, the rise of a culture that puts work at the center of our lives, and the "antisocial century," in which technology has made it easier than ever to avoid spending time with other people. The result is a world where many of us trade de...
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May 29, 2026 • 57 mins
The NBA’s vibes have been unusually awful recently. There has been widespread hand-wringing about the homogenization of modern offenses and the league’s notoriously weak regular-season TV ratings. A tanking crisis saw about a third of teams purposely try to lose games in a race to secure the top pick in the 2026 draft. A barrage of gambling scandals took out a head coach and several players. And the playoffs have brough...
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May 22, 2026 • 59 mins
Over the past century, attitudes about gender roles have become one of the clearest dividing lines in the country. Many Republicans, both men and women, say men are getting a raw deal in modern America. Many Democrats see that claim as completely off base.
So where does that split come from, and why has it become so central to politics?
Journalist Helen Lewis calls this emerging worldview “masculinism,” an ideology th...
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May 19, 2026 • 61 mins
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 d...
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May 15, 2026 • 61 mins
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 underest...
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May 12, 2026 • 54 mins
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...
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May 8, 2026 • 60 mins
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 th...
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May 5, 2026 • 45 mins
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 pa...
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May 1, 2026 • 49 mins
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, 'Insid...
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April 28, 2026 • 58 mins
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 emb...
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April 24, 2026 • 70 mins
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....
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April 21, 2026 • 62 mins
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 cybers...
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April 14, 2026 • 64 mins
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...
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