PODCAST · news
Plain English with Derek Thompson
by The Ringer
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 [email protected]! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson
Episodes
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AI Is Smarter Than Ever. So Where’s the Revolution?
AI can analyze anything, write anything, solve almost any puzzle. But struggle strengthens our brains and sharpens our minds ... and removing it entirely may come with a dire cost. Derek Thompson explores the paradoxes of AI with Ethan Mollick, whose new book, 'Co-Existence,' examines how AI is...
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How Abundance Has Failed and Succeeded
A year and a half after 'Abundance,' Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s book about why America has become so bad at building things, the time has come for reflection. Some commentators declare the abundance agenda dead. If you know where to look, however, you might see a different picture. Today,...
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America’s Crisis of Social Connection, With Adam Grant
Americans spend more time alone than ever, as parties, nights out with friends, and dinner gatherings become less common. Cellphones, social media, TV, and the internet have made it easier than ever to fill our free time without other people. Research suggests friendship is less about instant...
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Russia’s Plague Mystery and the Coming Age of Bioweapons
AI apocalypse, recession fears, sky-high mortgage rates, and now, the plague? Last week, a researcher at a plague institute in Siberia died after developing severe pneumonia, sparking rumors of biowarfare and fears of a new epidemic. How much of the story is fact vs. fiction, and what does it…
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The Bitter Rivalries Behind the Race to Build Superintelligence
Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis are three of the most important figures in AI superintelligence, but each of them have very different ideas about what this technology should become and what it could mean for the future. Kevin Roose, author of 'The AGI Chronicles,' joins Derek to...
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Why the Midterms Suddenly Look So Bad for Republicans
Last year, Republicans were the heavy favorites to hold the Senate in the following years midterms. Now, however, prediction markets and political forecasters see a very different race. Today, Nate Silver joins Derek to explain what’s behind Donald Trump’s plummeting approval ratings, and how the...
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Why Things Become Popular, with Chuck Klosterman
What makes a hit a hit? Why do some bands make it while others fade into obscurity? Chuck Klosterman’s new book imagines an alternate history of 20th century music and uses it to explore why some things become popular and just how much culture depends on chance. Subscribe to our YouTube channel...
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The Single Smartest Case Against AI Doom
With new breakthroughs in math and biology alongside reports of AI agents escaping and hacking systems, suffice it to say AI has had an interesting few weeks. How worried should we be about it all? Derek talks with researchers Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of the “AI as a Normal...
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The Truth About Mississippi's Education "Miracle"
Education outcomes have been getting worse across much of the world, with reading and math scores falling to historic lows. The U.S. has seen some of the steepest declines in decades. But, why does Mississippi look so different? Mississippi education reformer Rachel Canter has been at the…
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Why Experts Keep Getting the Economy So Wrong
Expert economists keep making predictions about America’s financial future, and those predictions keep being … wrong. Over the past few years, we’ve heard warnings about a recession, inflation, tariffs, wars, deficits, and an AI bubble, yet the economy continues chugging along. Today, Derek talks...
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What’s the Point of College?
Trust in American higher education is near a historic low. Tuition has soared, and the payoff for a college degree is now in question as graduates face a weird and challenging job market. Simultaneously, AI is transforming everything around them, from academic fraud to job applications. It all...
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The New Book That Scares Big Tech
In the late 19th century, a railroad boom fueled by easy money, speculative investment, and new technology helped kick off one of the worst financial crises in American history. Sound kind of familiar? In today’s episode, Derek talks with author Liaquat Ahamed about his new book, '1873,' and the...
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AI Slop Is Breaking the Internet. Can We Save It?
So many people seem to hate AI, and it’s not just because it might displace millions of jobs, destroy the world, or deepen distrust in big corporations and government. The reason might actually be simpler than we think: People don't like AI because it is so often used to make things that are…
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Why Everything Is Going to Keep Getting More Expensive
For much of the 21st century, the U.S. economy was built around cheap money. Today, though, interest rates are rising, and borrowing is getting much more expensive. At the same time, the federal government is running huge deficits while governments and companies around the world are taking on...
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Higher Education’s Age of ‘Insufferable Hypocrisy’
It would be an understatement to say that higher education is in crisis, as it faces attacks from both the current presidential administration as well as issues of its own making, like diversity politics. Today, Derek talks with Tyler Austin Harper, author of the viral essay “Confessions of a…
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It May Be Time to Freak Out About AI
Today, Derek talks with cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos about a recent wave of alarming AI cyberattacks. For decades, one of the biggest fears about AI has been that the machines will start doing things we didn’t ask them to do. This summer, that fear started to feel a little less like science...
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Why Americans Hate Data Centers
It seems a universal fact that AI has become an indispensable part of the American economy. At the same time, opposing AI has also become one of the most influential causes in American politics. Nowhere is that tension more obvious than in the fight over data centers. Across the country,...
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Why America Is Switching From Booze to Weed
Two extraordinary trends are happening in the United States simultaneously. One is that alcohol consumption is declining precipitously. The share of Americans who drink has hit a record low since Gallup started tracking it in the 1930s. In 2004, fewer than 30 percent of Americans under 35 said...
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"The End of Reading Is Here"
There’s no doubt that reading is in decline. But what is that decline doing to the way we think? Derek talks with The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch about why Americans are reading fewer books than ever and struggling more with complex texts and what that means for education, work, politics, and...
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What Translator Emily Wilson Thinks of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey'
Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' has brought one of history's oldest stories back into the spotlight. It’s also sparked a fresh debate about what it means to adapt a classic. Today, Derek is joined by acclaimed classicist and translator Emily Wilson, whose celebrated translation of 'The Odyssey'...
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Why 'The Odyssey' Is the West’s Greatest Story
Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' is finally here, but how exactly has a 3,000-year-old story endured long enough to become the foundation of Western storytelling? Derek is joined by Karen Ní Mheallaigh, chair of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, to explore the mysterious origins of Homer's...
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A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory for Why the World Feels So Weird
Why does it feel like everything is more divided and exhausting than it used to be? Philosopher Agnes Callard has a surprisingly simple answer: the unicontext. It's her term for what happens when billions of people are all forced to inhabit the same global conversation through the internet and...
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How Israel Is Transforming American Politics
Peter Beinart joins Derek to unpack a major shift inside the Democratic Party. As Democratic Socialist-backed candidates notch a string of surprising primary victories, one issue has emerged as a defining political litmus test: Israel and the war in Gaza. But it's difficult to hold two ideas at...
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MEGAPOD: The Most Overrated American Who Ever Lived
To celebrate America's 250th birthday, Derek is joined for a history draft by three of the country's leading historians: Beverly Gage, H.W. (Bill) Brands, and Richard White. The goal isn't to revisit the familiar stories everyone learned in school. It's to uncover the people, events, and ideas…
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A Surprising Theory About the Future of War
From the bombing campaigns of World War II to the precision strikes of the modern era, for 80 years air power has defined modern warfare. But today, a new technology is changing the battlefield: drones. From Ukraine to the Middle East, cheap drones are transforming how wars are fought, giving...
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SpaceX, AI Bubble Fears, and The Age of the Trillion-Dollar, Zero-Profit Company
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…
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The Iran War Is Ending. Everybody Lost.
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…
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The Donald Trump Corruption Scandal Draft
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…
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The Most Exciting Month of Medical Breakthroughs in Years
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...
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Old-igarchy: How the Elderly Conquered American Power
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,...
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How Modern Fatherhood Is Changing Men’s Brains
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...
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What 400,000 Essays Reveal About AI and Creativity
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…
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The Surprising Truth About America's Friendship Crisis
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,"…
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Why the NBA Feels Broken—and Why the League Can’t Fix It
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...
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The Men Who Think Toxic Feminism Destroyed America
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...
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Does Anybody Know How to Solve an American Debt Crisis?
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...
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The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Think
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...
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The Case Against the AI Job Apocalypse
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…
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Why American Happiness Just Fell Off a Cliff
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...
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One of the Deadliest Cancers in America May Have Met Its Match
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,...
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Why Too Much Freedom Is the Enemy of Success
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…
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Why the Iran War Is Tearing MAGA Apart
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…
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The Triple Crisis That’s Breaking Hollywood—and Changing the Future of Movies
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...
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The Most Powerful and Dangerous AI Model Yet
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…
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The Whole World Is Fighting About Energy
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...
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‘The Job Market for Young People Is Brutal’
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...
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America's Religious Revival Is a Mirage
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…
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Is China the Winner of the Iran War?
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...
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Why We're Addicted to ‘Sh*tty Flow’
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…
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Anthropic Thinks AI Might Destroy the Economy. It's Building It Anyway.
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…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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 [email protected]! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson
HOSTED BY
The Ringer
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Plain English with Derek Thompson have?
Plain English with Derek Thompson currently has 411 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Plain English with Derek Thompson about?
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...
How often does Plain English with Derek Thompson release new episodes?
Plain English with Derek Thompson publishes regularly with 411 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Plain English with Derek Thompson on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Plain English with Derek Thompson?
Plain English with Derek Thompson is created and hosted by The Ringer.
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