Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer
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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. -21 H

    Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk

    Who is the most successful president in American history? George Washington secured American independence. Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and ended slavery. Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Depression, remade government, and won World War II. But if we define "success" as the ability to articulate your goals and achieve every single one of them, perhaps only one president in American history was ever perfectly successful. In 1845, James K. Polk, newly elected by a whisker-thin margin, confided to his friend George Bancroft the four goals of his four years in the White House. Acquire Oregon from Great Britain. Acquire California from Mexico. Reduce the tariff. Establish an independent treasury. Four years later, he'd done all this and more. As the historian Daniel Patrick Howe wrote, "Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States has ever had.” And that’s why Polk is the subject of today’s show. I don’t think another president in American history has so large a gap between his modern reputation and his actual achievement. There are two great biographies about Polk that I’ve read that have been published in the last 20 years. I’m very pleased that today, we have both authors on the show. Walter Borneman is the author of 'Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America.' And Robert Merry is the author of 'A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent_._' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Walter Borneman and Robert Merry Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1 h 5 min

  2. -3 J

    The Trump-Musk Doctrine: F-ck Around and Find Out

    For the past month, chaos and confusion have gripped Washington and the federal government. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have served as an iron fist of the Trump administration—ransacking government agencies, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as they can get away with. Much of this work is plainly illegal. Every 12 hours, it seems, another federal judge rules that the Trump administration has exceeded its executive authority. Efficiency is a worthy goal, and some of the programs that Musk and his team cut may turn out to be wasteful. Still, the way Musk has gone about his work—destroying life-saving programs at USAID, mistakenly offering buyouts to nuclear assembly engineers and essential doctors with Veterans Affairs, slashing funds for important studies and data collection programs across government—suggests that his bureaucratic blitzkrieg isn't just illegal; it's careless and harmful. The U.S. deserves a theory of government more sophisticated than "F-ck around and find out." So, what would an effective DOGE look like? Today’s guests are Michael Geruso, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Tim Layton, a professor of health care policy at UVA. We explain why any sensible waste and fraud search-and-destroy effort should start with health care spending. Then we get very nerdy about waste and fraud in health care. Most importantly, we talk about trade-offs. It’s a myth that there is some pot of $10 billion just lying around, doing nothing, gathering dust. Every dollar of federal government spending goes to a person in a place doing a thing. And that means that every dollar we cut will have a recipient on the other end who is losing a dollar. Taking government efficiency seriously requires thinking about both sides of this equation: What do we get when we spend this dollar, and what do we lose when we take that dollar away? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Michael Geruso and Tim Layton Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1 h 4 min

  3. 14 FÉVR.

    Is There a Scientific Case for Believing in God?

    This is a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time. It's about the decline of religion in America, the value of faith, the case for belief, and the rational reasons to believe in God. My guest is the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He is a Catholic conservative. From an identity checkbox standpoint, we are very different people. But Ross is one of my favorite writers from any point of the ideological spectrum. His new book is 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' and it begins with an extremely compelling description of Ross reading the feedback he’s getting at the Times, watching that feedback evolve from “You stupid idiot, how could you possibly believe in a magical man in the sky?” to “I think I’m missing something in my life, a religion-sized hole at the center of my community or myself. Can you help me find it?” We talk about his religious journey and mine, the history of religion in America, the popular misconception that science automatically rolled back religiosity, the rational, scientific case for the existence of God, why I find that case emotionally lacking, and the case for even secular people to believe in God. And, finally, I invite Ross to give me his single best case that Christianity is true. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ross Douthat Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1 h 9 min

  4. 11 FÉVR.

    Fraud, Scandal, and Failure in the Fight Against Alzheimer's Disease

    Why is it so hard to find a cure for Alzheimer’s? A simple answer is that the brain and its disorders are complicated. But as today’s guest, Charles Piller, writes, there’s another, more sinister factor at play. His new book, 'Doctored,' traces an incredible, true story of fraud, arrogance, and tragedy in the quest to cure Alzheimer’s. In the last few years, some of the most famous and revered neuroscientists in America have been accused of doctoring images in research related to Alzheimer’s and neuroscience—even as they raised tens of millions of dollars in funding based on this doctored science and set up clinical trials for thousands of patients based on these manipulated results. At the same time, a silent conspiracy of groupthink starved this field of research of fresh ideas, with catastrophic consequences. Piller explains how he broke the story of what might be this century's biggest scandal in American medical science. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles Piller Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    57 min

  5. 7 FÉVR.

    The Energy Story of the Moment: The Unstoppable Rise of Solar Vs. the Unmovable Demand for Global Fossil Fuels

    Fans of green energy like me face some inconvenient truths about the global energy picture. First, coal sounds like a dirty technology that the rich world is moving on from. But nearly 9 billion tons of coal were burned last year—an all-time high. Second, "peak oil" is a prediction that many analysts have thrown around in the past few years, but oil production is also near its all-time high. Third, we might not even be at peak wood: Global wood fuel production was higher in 2024 than in 1980. At the same time, I think the renewable energy revolution is proving to be its own unstoppable phenomenon. Solar and battery installations are still exploding upward, and whereas some skeptics worried that the earth wouldn’t be able to provide the essential elements and metals to build out a green energy system, those doubts seem, for the moment, overwrought. Lithium, which is one of the most important metals for battery production, has seen its resources double since 2018. So what we have is not a pretty picture but a messy one. A green energy boom matched with an enormous demand for fossil fuels, as billions of people around the world drive and eat and demand the middle-class lifestyle that is their right. Today’s guest is Nat Bullard, an independent energy analyst and the author of a new extraordinary report on the state of energy and decarbonization. We talk about everything: coal, oil, wood, and natural gas; the history of nuclear vs. solar in America; the solar and battery revolution of the 21st century; the political barriers to its growth; the rise of BYD in China; the flatlining of Tesla's growth; and the future of energy technology. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Nat Bullard Producer: Devon Baroldi Nat's report: https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1 h 12 min

  6. 4 FÉVR.

    The 5 Types of Wealth

    Wealth isn’t just about financial security, according to today’s guest, Sahil Bloom. It’s about time wealth (the freedom to control our own schedules), social wealth (deep relationships with family and friends), mental wealth (the space to think clearly about the most important questions in life), and physical wealth (health and vitality). Bloom’s new book, 'The 5 Types of Wealth,' is uncommonly wise and deep on the questions I care about most. Why is it so hard to make friends late in life? How can we build a life that combines freedom and control with duty and responsibility? What does it really mean to control our time? What’s the best career advice? I think Bloom is uncommonly good at a job that too many people try and very few people master: serving as a clearinghouse for truly excellent advice about being alive and being decent to other people. It’s a lesson we really need to hear these days. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Sahil Bloom Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1 h 3 min

  7. 31 JANV.

    Are GLP-1 Drugs "the Greatest Medical Breakthrough of the 21st Century"?

    In the past few years, we've learned that GLP-1 drugs don’t just help with diabetes or increase people’s feelings of fullness to help them lose weight. They have broad effects on substance abuse and behavior. They even seem to help with otherwise incurable illnesses, like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. This month, a team of scientists studying 2 million patients in the Veterans Affairs medical system found that GLP-1s were associated with “a reduced risk of substance use and psychotic disorders, seizures, neurocognitive disorders (including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia), coagulation disorders (clotting), cardiometabolic disorders (like strokes and heart attacks), infectious illnesses and several respiratory conditions.” Today’s guest is a coauthor on the paper, Ziyad Al-Aly. He is a physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. We talk about his new paper, the steps he took to make sure his findings were trustworthy, why GLP-1 drugs might work so well, what they’re teaching us about the brain and body, how they’re scrambling our sense of where volition begins and where free will ends, and what scientists should do next with the revelation that these drugs have effects that go far beyond obesity and diabetes. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ziyad Al-Aly Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Al-Aly et al. on the effectiveness and risks of GLP-1 drugs [link] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1 h 4 min

  8. 24 JANV.

    Tech Talk: AI Supremacy, TikTok’s Fate, and Crypto Decadence

    Today, tech talk with an old friend of the pod, Kevin Roose of The New York Times, who is also host of the 'Hard Fork' podcast. This is a show about everything. And it’s going to remain a show about everything because I’m a little bit interested in everything. But one cost of that purposeful lack of narrow focus is that sometimes you fail to communicate the gravity of the important things that are happening in the world. And at the moment, I think some of the most important stories in the world are in tech—and more specifically, in the relationship between government and technology. A relationship that is closer now than it’s been in many decades. We begin with TikTok—the most popular source of news for Gen Z in America and the most downloaded mobile app in the world in 2024. Last year a bipartisan bill signed by Joe Biden demanded that the parent company of TikTok, which is the Chinese firm ByteDance, sell its American business or else face a ban. Well, today, TikTok is legally banned in America, and also in broad use, because Donald Trump—the man who called for banning the app in 2020—saved it in 2025 by essentially declaring that he won’t uphold the law. We then spend most of this episode talking about the crescendo of predictions from Silicon Valley that the AI frontier is nearing a breakthrough. In the past few weeks, members of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs have claimed that they are less than three years away from building AI agents that are, to borrow their language, better than humans at everything. I ask Kevin how widespread these predictions are, whether we should believe them, what it would mean if they’re right, why they might wrong, what’s the biggest bottleneck still standing in their way, and why it’s so hard for the news media to report responsibly on a story like this, where we’re asked to take seriously the economy-shifting potential of a technology that we can’t actually report on because it doesn’t actually exist. And then, because I’m also completely bewildered by the bonfires of corruption that are erupting in crypto-land, we close on crypto. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kevin Roose Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    1 h 4 min
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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_

Informations

  • Création
    The Ringer
  • Années d’activité
    2021 - 2025
  • Épisodes
    274
  • Classification
    Contenu explicite
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved.
  • Site web de l’émission
    Plain English with Derek Thompson

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