Today’s episode is about how we think about success—and how our high school and college systems might be teaching us the wrong lessons about achievement and personal progress. Our guest is Lisa Damour, a psychologist and the author of three New York Times bestsellers, including 'The Emotional Lives of Teenagers.' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com . You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson...
Mar 28, 2023•51 min•Season 2Ep. 25
Sometimes on this show, we talk about the news. This episode is about the diametric opposite of the news. It’s about thinking deeply about human history and trying to appreciate the awesome length of time and the finitude of our lives. It's an interview with Tim Urban, a blogger at the mind-expanding site Wait But Why, and the author of a new book What’s Our Problem: A Self-Help Book for Societies. If you don’t know Tim and his work, I would sum up his thing this way: Tim is a kind of alien. He ...
Mar 24, 2023•56 min•Season 2Ep. 24
Derek unpacks his thoughts about GPT-4 and what it means to be, possibly, at the dawn of a sea change in technology. Then, he talks to Charlie Warzel, staff writer at The Atlantic, about what GPT-4 is capable of, the most interesting ways people are using it, how it could change the way we work, and why some people think it will bring about the apocalypse. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com . You can find us on TikTok at www.ti...
Mar 21, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 23
Derek answers your burning questions in a special mailbag episode! If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mar 17, 2023•39 min•Season 2Ep. 22
Derek welcomes back the economic roundtable of Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson, cohosts of the 'Animal Spirits' podcast, to debate who killed Silicon Valley Bank, how much we should blame the Fed, how much we should blame Silicon Valley venture capital firms, whether this will change the direction of monetary policy, and whether the U.S. has too many banks in the first place. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com . You can find us...
Mar 15, 2023•42 min•Season 2Ep. 21
RIP, SVB. America's 16th-largest bank was just destroyed by the largest bank run in U.S. history. To talk about what happened and what happens next, we have Liz Hoffman, business and finance editor at Semafor and the author of the book 'Crash Landing,' on the Fed’s response to the pandemic. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com . You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Liz Hoffman Pro...
Mar 13, 2023•39 min•Season 2Ep. 20
Under President Biden, the U.S. is pivoting toward what some people call “industrial policy”—that is, using the government to support key industries, like green energy manufacturing and the manufacture of advanced computer chips. There is a strong case against industrial policy in economics: It’s the idea that governments do not know better than markets when it comes to picking winners, and industrial policy just wastes money and distorts the economy. But there’s another view, which is that indu...
Mar 10, 2023•51 min•Season 2Ep. 19
Today’s episode is a long one: It’s about the debate over media coverage of COVID. Three years after the fateful March of 2020, when it feels like the world shut down for COVID, we are revisiting two of the most contentious debates in this space. No. 1: The lab leak hypothesis; which is the debate over the possibility that COVID originated at a laboratory in China and not, as the official story went, at a wet market in Wuhan. And no. 2: the mask debate. And why a seemingly simple question—do mas...
Mar 07, 2023•1 hr 35 min•Season 2Ep. 18
This is our second installment of happiness week on the Plain English podcast. On Tuesday, I spoke with the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development about what makes a good life, based on their 80-year longitudinal study. Today’s episode is about the phenomenon of rising teenage unhappiness. What's actually happening? Why is it happening? What theories make sense, and what theories don't? How can we fix this problem? Today's guest is Matthew Biel, the chief of child and adolescent psy...
Mar 03, 2023•55 min•Season 2Ep. 17
Americans have never had more access to social technology. It’s easier to talk to friends and family members hundreds of miles away; easier to see their faces; and easier to find single people to date. But if you ask them, Americans today will say they are as lonely as or lonelier than any time on record. The amount of time all Americans spend alone has increased every year for about a decade. What's going on? Today’s episode is about the longest study on happiness in U.S. history — the Harvard ...
Feb 28, 2023•59 min•Season 2Ep. 16
How does technology shape art? Why has songwriting become more of a visual skill in the 21st century? Why are today's hit songs shorter than songs from any period since the Beatles? What happened to the guitar solo intro—and the classic rock genre in general? How did rap and hip-hop take over the charts? Derek welcomes the musician, writer, and data analyst Chris Dalla Riva to discuss the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that music hits have changed since the 1960s. If you have questions, observati...
Feb 24, 2023•52 min•Season 2Ep. 15
Large language models like ChatGPT and Bing’s chatbot can tell stories. They can analyze the effects of agricultural AI on American and Chinese farms. They can pass medical licensing exams, summarize 1,000-page documents, and score a 147 on an IQ test. That’s the 99.9th percentile. They’re also liars. They don't know what year it is. They recommend books that don’t exist. They write nonsense on request. Today's guest, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose, spent a few hours last week talking to ...
Feb 21, 2023•51 min•Season 2Ep. 14
Since a big white Chinese spy balloon floated across the ocean and into U.S. airspace, the United States has shot down four objects over North American skies. What are we looking at, and what are we shooting at? Are these objects American? Are they Chinese? Are they human? To tell the full story of this bizarre month in aerial objects—from the balloon to the aerial shoot-out to the UFO freak-out—we’ve got two guests: former Atlantic correspondent and Substack writer James Fallows and the science...
Feb 17, 2023•50 min•Season 2Ep. 13
Last fall, three-quarters of voters told CNN that the U.S. was in a recession. A Bloomberg economic model said that the odds of a recession by the fall of 2023 were 100 percent. But we’re not in a recession. The unemployment rate is lower than any month since the 1960s. Real disposable income is growing. The economy is expanding. Consumer spending is strong. Even housing seems to be rebounding. In today's episode, Derek explains the origins of the great American recession myth, and Bloomberg wri...
Feb 14, 2023•34 min•Season 2Ep. 12
For the past 50 years, Americans have basically responded to the case against eating animals by eating more animals. The share of Americans who call themselves vegan or vegetarian hasn’t increased in the past 20 years. But a few years ago, I was certain that we were near peak meat, thanks to the rise of plant-based “meat” products—like Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat sausages. In 2019 and 2020, I looked like a genius, as meat-substitute products surged. But then came the crash. Beyond Meat’s ...
Feb 10, 2023•38 min•Season 2Ep. 11
If we’re being honest, the whole thing is kind of funny. A Chinese spy balloon floated across the U.S. Nobody died, unless we count the balloon itself. In a saner age, this story would be over. But balloongate offers a useful hook to evaluate the relationship between the U.S. and China during a period of extraordinarily high tensions. These are the most powerful countries in the world, the two largest economies in the history of the world, and they are currently undergoing a kind of conscious un...
Feb 07, 2023•44 min•Season 2Ep. 10
We’ve got a double-barrelled podcast for you. Jeanna Smialek, economics reporter for the ‘New York Times,’ joins us to break down the debt-ceiling showdown that’s enveloping Washington. Plus, economist Jason Furman is back to rehash his debt-ceiling grievances from the Obama administration, then answer some deeper questions about the U.S. debt trajectory and the state of the economy today. But first: a new way to think about the debt ceiling and fears of the U.S. government running up the tab. I...
Feb 03, 2023•57 min•Season 2Ep. 9
"Productivity is a trap. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved work-life balance. The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse." That's how Oliver Burkeman, the author of 'Four Thousand Weeks,' explains our relationship to happiness and time. In this ep...
Jan 31, 2023•48 min•Season 2Ep. 8
“The story of 2022 was the emergence of AI," wrote Ben Thompson, the author of the Stratechery newsletter and podcast. "It seems clear to me that this is a new epoch in technology.” Ben and Derek talk about ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, the state of generative AI, and how the biggest tech companies will try to wrangle this fascinating suite of new tools. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.c...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Derek breaks down the biggest economic mystery of the moment: Why are the most successful tech companies collectively laying off more than 130,000 people if the overall unemployment rate is still historically low? Then award-winning Puck journalist William Cohan rejoins the podcast to talk about the biggest unanswered questions swirling around disgraced billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, his FTX bankruptcy proceedings, and his forthcoming criminal case. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: William Cohan Prod...
Jan 24, 2023•48 min•Season 2Ep. 6
We have historically thought about weight as the mere outcome of our deliberate choices about diet and exercise. We have not typically thought about weight like a disease. But in the past 18 months, there’s been an extraordinary revolution in weight-loss medication that's putting in our hands a therapy that can help people easily shed weight without major side effects. You may have heard these drugs go by the name Wegovy or Ozempic. What happens when you take a country obsessed with self-image a...
Jan 20, 2023•53 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Today’s episode is about what Americans don’t get about food—and the historical origins of our diet delusions. Our guest is Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist who has researched and written on obesity and diet. He explains why scientists still haven't arrived at a consensus on obesity, why he thinks the conventional wisdom about calories and fat is wrong, what he thinks is really going on, and why the history of diet advice has been so wrong in the last half-century. On Friday, we'll continue ...
Jan 17, 2023•48 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Last year was a bloodbath for media of all stripes. Netflix crashed, the advertising market cratered, Disney fired a CEOBob and replaced him with a CEOBob, and meanwhile, the domestic box office for films remained dormant. Outside of a handful of huge hits like 'Top Gun: Maverick,' the movie business is struggling to get people to see original movies that aren’t just the latest installation of familiar franchises. But one mistake that media people, like me, can often make is that we mistake curr...
Jan 13, 2023•40 min•Season 2Ep. 3
We should be living in a golden age of creativity in science and technology. We know more about the universe and ourselves than we did in any other period in history, and with easy access to superior research tools, our pace of discovery should be accelerating. But as one group of researchers from Stanford put it: “Everywhere we look we find that ideas … are getting harder to find.” Another paper found that “scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the early 1970s,” and yet a...
Jan 11, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson of Ritholtz Wealth Management rejoin the pod to talk about what they learned from the topsy-turvy 2022 economy and make predictions about 2023 markets. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com . You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...
Jan 04, 2023•45 min•Season 2Ep. 1
This has been an amazing year for the show, and I’m so grateful for everybody who has listened. I’m off the last two weeks of the year but I wanted to keep something in your feed over the holidays, so this week I’m reboosting one of our most popular episodes of the year. Maybe you listened and want to listen again. Maybe you missed this one, and want to check it out. Or you’re looking at this feed for the first time and trying to figure out whether this is your kind of show. I think these episod...
Dec 27, 2022•50 min•Season 1Ep. 119
This has been an amazing year for the show, and I’m so grateful for everybody who has listened. I’m off the last two weeks, but I wanted to keep something in your feed over the holidays, so this week I’m re-boosting one of our most popular episodes of the year. Maybe you listened and want to listen again. Maybe you missed this one and want to check it out. Or you’re looking at this feed for the first time and trying to figure out if this is your kind of show. I think these episodes offer a great...
Dec 20, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 118
Derek talks to economist and writer Eli Dourado about the most exciting scientific and technological discoveries of the year, from the AI toys that everybody seems to be playing with to lesser-known breakthroughs in bioscience, clean energy hardware, and precise atomic manipulation. Due to the holidays, we will be skipping our Friday episode this week. However, we’ll be back next Tuesday to revisit one of our favorite interviews from the past year as we inch closer to 2023. Host: Derek Thompson ...
Dec 13, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 117
In the last 50 years, average sperm counts have fallen by 50 percent. This isn’t just happening in the U.S. or Europe or Asia. It seems to be happening everywhere. If the current rate of decline continues, researchers concluded, the average male sperm count will fall so low that the typical guy in every advanced economy will be infertile by 2050. Harvard's Jorge Chavarro, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology, breaks down the data on declining sperm counts and tells us what it means, what mi...
Dec 09, 2022•50 min•Season 1Ep. 116
4 Day Week Global is a nonprofit organization that recently conducted a trial with 33 companies and 900 workers that replaced the typical five-day week with a four-day work week with no change in pay. After the six-month trial ended, 97 percent of employees who responded said they didn’t want to go back to five days per week, and most employers rated the overall experience 9 out of 10. The pandemic showed us that so much about the way we work is an accident of history, solidified by familiarity ...
Dec 06, 2022•51 min•Season 1Ep. 115
