Plain English with Derek Thompson

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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_

  1. 1D AGO

    A Grand, Unified Theory of Why Americans Are So Unhealthy

    Americans are unusually overweight and chronically ill compared to similarly rich countries. This episode presents a grand, unified theory for why that's the case. Our food environment has become significantly more calorie-rich and industrialized in the past few decades, sending our obesity rates soaring, our visceral fat levels rising, and our chronic inflammation surging. The result is an astonishing rise in chronic illness in America. That's the bad news. The good news is that GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Zepbound, seem to be astonishingly successful at reversing many of these trends. This episode blends two interviews with Dr. David Kessler and Dr. Eric Topol. Kessler was the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under the Bush and Clinton administrations, from 1990 to 1997. He helped lead Operation Warp Speed in its final months. He is the author of the book 'Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine.' Topol is a cardiologist and the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. He is the author of the book 'Super Agers.' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Dr. David Kessler and Dr. Eric Topol Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    40 min

  2. JUN 11

    Why Are Americans So Unhealthy? Part I: Is Ultra-Processed Food Killing Us?

    Americans die younger and faster than the residents of almost every other rich country. Why? There's gun violence, drug overdoses, and car crashes. Young people are much more likely to die from these accidents than those in other countries. Just as importantly, Americans are more likely to die from chronic illness, especially heart disease and metabolic diseases. We eat more and worse food. We're arguably exposed to more environmental toxins. We move around less, too. Kevin Klatt, a research scientist at UC Berkeley and a nutritionist, joins us in the first episode of our new miniseries on health. We take on the hottest topic in the diet world today: ultra-processed foods. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kevin Klatt Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    54 min

  3. JUN 4

    What Experts Really Think About Smartphones and Mental Health

    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. They insist that there is little to no empirical data showing that smartphone and social media use drives up anxiety or depression. So what’s the truth about smartphones, social media, and mental health? That’s the question that the NYU researcher Jay Van Bavel set out to answer with his collaborator Valerio Capraro. They took dozens of claims about smartphones, sent them to hundreds of experts in the field, and asked them if these claims were probably true, probably false, or unknown—and why. The result was a massive survey, one of the largest of its kind in the history of psychology. Today, Van Bavel joins the show to tell us what he found, what surprised him, and why his consensus survey made so many researchers so angry. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jay Van Bavel Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 9m

  4. MAY 30

    Plain History: How Adolf Hitler Destroyed German Democracy in Six Months

    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 Hitler requires no news peg, but I’ve been particularly interested in understanding the story of Hitler's rise, because in the past few months, several prominent podcast hosts—including Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson—have mainstreamed revisionist histories of the Nazi regime and WWII. These new histories often soften Hitler’s antisemitism and treat him as a man of limited ambition; a guy who just wanted to give Germans a bit more living room, who was pulled into a continental war by Winston Churchill. The best book that I’ve read that makes use of the trove of documentation on the subject is 'Hitler’s People,' by the historian Richard Evans, who is today's guest. Evans is the author of a famous three-volume history of Hitler—'The Coming of the Third Reich,' 'The Third Reich in Power,' and 'The Third Reich at War'_—_and he is widely considered the most comprehensive historian of Nazi Germany in the world. His new book distills his multi-thousand-page history into an elegant 100-page synthesis of Hitler’s life, followed by profiles of his most important advisers. The end of the book is particularly interesting, as it profiles ordinary Germans of the time, for the purpose of explaining how normal, non-psychopathic people found themselves involved in a regime so brutal that it’s become a synonym for evil. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Richard Evans Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 4m

  5. MAY 28

    Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Is Great for the "Stealthy Wealthy"

    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 could be forgiven for not realizing just how many different parts of the economy it will change. In the realm of workers' comp, the bill would eliminate taxes on overtime pay and tips. In terms of families, it would create new $1,000 savings accounts for children and give parents an extra $500 per year per child, in the form of an expanded child tax credit. In the realm of health and the culture wars, it would ban the use of Medicaid funds for gender-affirming care and cut funding for Planned Parenthood. In the realm of climate, it would claw back half a trillion dollars of investments in wind, solar, geothermal, batteries, nuclear power, clean hydrogen, and electric vehicle purchases. In the realm of defense, it would increase spending by over $100 billion on shipbuilding, air and missile defense, immigration enforcement, and border security. But judging strictly by the sheer dollar amount of the provision, this bill is really about three big things. Number one, it extends a multitrillion-dollar tax cut on corporate and individual income. Number two, it reduces federal spending on two major government programs by a combined $1 trillion: Medicaid, the government health-care program for those with low income, and SNAP, or federal spending on food stamps. And number three, because of the mismatch I just told you about, between the tax cuts and the spending cuts, it will increase the national debt by several trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Today, we have two guests. First, the University of Chicago economist Eric Zwick joins to talk about the corporate tax cut. And second, to understand how to think about the debt picture, I talk to Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Eric Zwick and Maya MacGuineas Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 8m

  6. MAY 23

    The Gene-Editing Breakthrough That Saved a Baby’s Life

    Last year, Kyle and Nicole Muldoon welcomed their baby KJ into the world. Almost immediately, doctors realized something was wrong. KJ had been born with a genetic mutation that made it impossible to regulate the amount of ammonia in his system. The rare disease had the potential to kill him or cause severe brain damage. But KJ is almost 10 months old today. And he’s doing better than ever. Because this little baby has become a piece of medical history: the first patient of any age to receive a personalized gene-editing treatment. It's truly remarkable. In the hundreds of years of modern science, no human being had ever received a medicine designed specifically to correct their genetic mutation. A medicine built for one. That is, until KJ Muldoon. Today, we have a very special guest: Dr. Kiran Musunuru, the gene-editing researcher at the University of Pennsylvania at the center of this breakthrough. We talk about the full story of saving baby KJ, what this breakthrough means for science, and what we need to learn or change to make personalized genetic medicine possible at a larger scale. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Dr. Kiran Musunuru Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    51 min

  7. MAY 20

    The Rules of Attraction and the Psychology of Romance

    Psychology is hard, even when you’re just trying to understand what’s going on with one impossibly complex person. Romance psychology is particularly hard because you’re trying to understand what’s going on between two impossibly complex people. Eli Finkel is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Paul Eastwick is a professor at the University of California, Davis. Both are experts on the psychology of attraction, dating, and romance and hosts of the Love Factually podcast. Today, Derek asks: Does anybody actually have "a type"? Are we any good at predicting the sort of people we’ll fall in love with? Has online dating caused people to over-filter for attraction, even though initial attraction doesn't determine long-term compatibility? How do modern, affluent folks' incredibly high expectations of marriage affect satisfaction in long-term relationships? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 6m

  8. MAY 16

    Plain History: How Norman Borlaug Stopped the Apocalypse

    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 would destroy the planet—that fertility would outrun the food supply, and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. The most famous warning was 'The Population Bomb,' a bestselling book published in 1968 by Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed "the battle to feed all of humanity is over" and “hundreds of millions of people would starve to death” in the 1970s. But then the 1970s came and went. And global famine deaths didn’t rise. They declined by 90 percent. In the 1980s, deaths from world hunger fell again. And again in the 1990s. And again in the 2000s. The apocalypse that everybody said was coming never came. And the reason is, basically, we invented super wheat. In the 1950s and 1960s, a plant pathologist named Norman Borlaug, working in Mexico on fungus-resistant wheat on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, managed to create a breed of wheat that was super abundant, efficient, and disease-resistant. His work kickstarted what’s known as the Green Revolution, a movement whose discoveries are responsible for keeping roughly half the planet alive. In 2007, when Borlaug was 93, The Wall Street Journal editorialized that he had “arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion.” Today’s guest is Charles C. Mann, a journalist and author. We talk about the long history of the Green Revolution. Who was Norman Borlaug? What did he actually do? How did he do it? What does his accomplishment teach us about science, invention, and progress? We’re at a moment today when American science is being cut to the bone while foreign aid is being slashed. I sometimes hear the question: What is foreign aid really worth to us? I think it’s important to remember that Norman Borlaug was a foundation-funded scientist who didn’t do his most important work in air-conditioned labs at Harvard or Johns Hopkins. His breakthroughs came in lean-to shacks in Mexico, where he worked to improve harvests. Without Borlaug’s accomplishments, the world would look very different: Famines might trigger migration that destabilizes countries and transforms global politics. The world we have today, where countries like China and India can easily feed their huge populations, is a gift to global stability, to humanity, to America. It grew from the seed of a foreign agricultural support program. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles C. Mann Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1h 11m
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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. 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_

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