Plain English with Derek Thompson

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 Canad...

2026-04-24

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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...

2026-04-21

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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 competin...

2026-04-14

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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 h...

2026-04-10

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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 sto...

2026-04-08

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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 ...

2026-04-03

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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 cal...

2026-04-01

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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 perspec...

2026-03-27

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America's Tax System Is Broken

If you're a typical worker with a salary, you have almost no control over how much tax you owe. But if you own a company worth billions of dollars, the income tax is, in the words of my guest today, "...

2026-03-24

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The Casino-ification of America

In 2017, Americans legally bet about $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to $160 billion. Gambling hasn’t just taken over sports. It’s invaded culture, politics, and even international w...

2026-03-20

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"Yes, AI Is a Bubble. There Is No Question."

The AI buildout continues to break records, as the hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions of dollars into chips and data centers, even as investors punish their stock prices. But the revenue side of t...

2026-03-17

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The Pill That Works Even When You Know It's Fake

Why do placebo effects work, even when patients know that they're taking a sugar pill? How do "nocebo" effects work, and why do some people hold onto beliefs that they suspect might bring them pain an...

2026-03-13

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The Economic Crisis of the Iran War Goes Far Beyond Oil

The Strait of Hormuz is the tiny bottleneck that could destabilize the global economy. As a critical passageway for crude oil, natural gas, and critical inputs for fertilizer, computer chips, and plas...

2026-03-10

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"American Democracy as We Know It Might Not Survive This Technology"

What happens when the two biggest stories in the world—the Trump White House and the development of advanced artificial intelligence—collide? Well, nothing good, apparently. When contract negotiations...

2026-03-09

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Trump Is Doubling Down on Iran. How Should Democrats Respond?

Donald Trump’s polling has continued to edge down week after week. And yet approval of the Democratic Party is still stuck near its all-time low, according to Gallup and other surveys. One interpreta...

2026-03-06

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The Four Ways That the Iran War Could End

Dramatic regime change. Moderate regime evolution. A calamitous regional conflict. Or … no change at all. Today we consider how the Iran conflict might evolve following the killing of Supreme Leader K...

2026-03-03

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How Metrics Make Us Miserable

The modern world swims in numbers: work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics, social media metrics. Sometimes the quantification of life can make things better. But very often, I think they force ...

2026-02-27

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The Future of GLP-1 Drugs and AI Medicine, With Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks

The GLP-1 drug revolution has taken the medicine world by storm. I’ve done several episodes on the science of GLP-1s. But we’ve never done an episode like this before, where we talk to one of the most...

2026-02-24

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The Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs. Now What?

Donald Trump suffered a huge blow Friday when the Supreme Court struck down the centerpiece of his economic policy: his vast system of tariffs. So, what happens now? Harvard’s Jason Furman explains th...

2026-02-21

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The Media Theory That Explains “99% of Everything”

In the mid-20th century, a group of media and communications scholars proposed that the shift from spoken to written language—from orality to literacy—transformed our politics, our media, our social r...

2026-02-17

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Plain English with Derek Thompson

Episodes (370 episodes)

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