Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. Cancer scientists are looking for a thousand perfect keys to pick a thousand stubborn locks. Today's episode is about the hardest lock of them all: pancreatic cancer. Cancer’s power lives in its camouflage. The immune system is often compared to a military search and destroy operation, with our T cells serving as the expert snipers, hunting down ant...
Mar 07, 2025•50 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright fascinating all at the same time. TV and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips joins to describe his experience working with them. We talk about the job of modern music composition; why he's worried AI might eventually do much of his current job; the morass of AI copyright law; and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain w...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers that they can’t read entire books. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. Why, with eve...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast If you had to describe the U.S. economy at the moment, I think you could do worse than the word stuck. The labor market is stuck. The low unemployment rate disguises how surprisingly hard it is to find a job today. The hiring rate has declined consistently since 2022, and it's now closer to its lowest level of the 21st century than the highest. We’re in this weird moment where it feels like everybody’s working but nobody’s hiring. Second, the housing market is stuck. Interest rates are high, tar...
Feb 25, 2025•57 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast 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, confid...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast 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 autho...
Feb 18, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast 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 beg...
Feb 14, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 11, 2025•57 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast 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,...
Jan 31, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Jan 24, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast This is the first episode of a little experiment we’re trying this year, a podcast within a podcast on history that we’re calling, simply enough, 'Plain History.' There are, I am well aware, a great number of history podcasts out there. But one thing I want to do with this show is to pay special attention to how the past worked. In this episode, for example, we're using the assassination of an American president to consider the practice of medicine in the 19th century. Our subject today is the b...
Jan 21, 2025•1 hr•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Today's episode has been a long time coming. For years, more scientists and health influencers have claimed that even moderate drinking does serious damage to one's health. As someone who likes being healthy and also loves a glass of wine (or scotch), Derek really wanted to understand this issue more deeply. This week, he published a long article in The Atlantic about his research on the health effects of moderate drinking—meaning one or two drinks a night. In today's episode, he breaks down his...
Jan 17, 2025•41 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast With so many confusing narratives unfolding around a fire that is still raging out of control, I wanted to talk to somebody I knew and trusted to get stories like this right. Robinson Meyer is the founder and editor of Heatmap News and a former staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate news and related disasters. We talk about why this Los Angeles fire is so unusual, how it differs from most recent forest fires in California, the role of climate change, and what Los Angeles and othe...
Jan 14, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast My new feature for The Atlantic magazine is called "The Anti-Social Century." It's a long article that revolves around a simple point: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. This surging solitude is changing our personalities, our politics, our culture, and our relationships. On this episode, University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley joins the show to talk about why aloneness matters. We talk about his research on relationships and solitude, on why we need people in our lives,...
Jan 10, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Happy new year! And what better way to celebrate the freshly torn calendar page than by welcoming one of Derek's favorite writers to the show to tell us what's in store for the 2025 economy. Michael Cembalest is the chairman of market and investment strategy for JPMorgan Asset Management, and the author of the truly spectacular newsletter, 'Eye on the Market.' Today, we start with stocks and describe the truly historic—and historically unprecedented—dominance of the so-called Mag-7 tech giants. ...
Jan 07, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Our final episode of the year is also my favorite annual tradition: conversations with scientists about the most important and, often, just plain mind-blowing breakthroughs of the previous 12 months. Today we’re talking about "organ clocks" (we'll explain) and other key biotech advances of 2024 with Eric Topol, an American cardiologist and author who is also the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. But first, Derek attempts a 'Plain English'-y summary of the most...
Dec 31, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast Why do Americans die younger than citizens of other rich countries? The most important reason is that life in America is inexcusably dangerous. The U.S. has more fatalities from gun violence, drug overdoses, and auto accidents than just about any other similarly rich nation, and its obesity rate is about 50 percent higher than the European average. Put this all together, and the U.S. is rightly considered a “rich death trap” for its young and middle-aged citizens. That’s the bad news. Now here’s...
Dec 27, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast So, here’s a scenario: It’s Monday. And you open up whatever calendar or planner or to-do list you use to organize the essential activities of the upcoming week. There’s a large project due Thursday. And an important meeting Wednesday. Your nine-to-five is chockablock with meetings, and your kid has a school function Tuesday, and there are holiday gifts to buy before Friday, and just when you’re pretty sure your week couldn’t possibly take one more featherweight of responsibilities, the HVAC uni...
Dec 20, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot to death outside a hotel in Manhattan by a young man motivated by rage at the insurance industry. His rage is clearly felt widely. In the aftermath of the killing, many people seemed to delight in the man’s assassination. Their reaction was a grotesque illustration of something real: There is an enormous amount of anger and frustration about the state of American health care. And there ought to be. The U.S. is the most expensive health care...
Dec 13, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast The crypto industry seems poised for a new golden age. But what exactly does that mean? Who would benefit? And, oh by the way, what does this technology do other than serve as a set of assets to bet to the moon? I have lots of questions about the state of crypto right now. Last week, Bitcoin traded above $100,000 for the first time in history. Its price has skyrocketed since Donald Trump’s win, as a wave of investors bet that the next four years will mark a new renaissance. And this isn’t just a...
Dec 06, 2024•53 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast In the last decade, several major findings in social psychology have turned out to be hogwash—or, worse, even fraud. This has become widely known as psychology's "replication crisis." Perhaps you have heard of power poses—based on a study finding that subjects reported stronger “feelings of power” after they posed, say, with their hands on their hips for several minutes. But that finding did not replicate. Or perhaps you have heard of ego depletion—the more famous assertion that, when people mak...
Nov 27, 2024•2 hr 50 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast Emily Oster, professor of economics at Brown University, joins the show to talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his theories about fluoride and vaccines, and how the media and science community should treat the most controversial topics. This is a new age of science and information, where trust seems to be shifting from institutions like the FDA and CDC to individuals like RFK Jr. and Oster, and I consider her a model of public health communication. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for...
Nov 22, 2024•41 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast What would a world of self-driven cars look like? How would it change shopping, transportation, and life, more broadly? A decade ago, many people were asking these questions, as it looked like a boom in autonomous vehicles was imminent. But in the last few years, other technologies—crypto, the metaverse, AI—have stolen the spotlight. Meanwhile, self-driving cars have quietly become a huge deal in the U.S. Waymo One, a commercial ride-hailing service that spun off from Google, has been rolled out...
Nov 15, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast Derek shares his big-picture theory for Trump's victory. Then, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson explains how Trump shifted practically the entire electorate to the right. Links: Derek's article that inspired his open: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/donald-trump-covid-election/680559/ The Washington Post voter shift map: https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/11/05/compare-2020-2024-presidential-results/ The graveyard of the incumbents: https://...
Nov 08, 2024•54 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s guest (our final preelection guest) is David Wasserman, political analyst with the Cook Political Report, who also helps out with the NBC decision desk. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people whose job on election night is to help Americans understand when we can safely call specific districts and states for Congress, Senate, or the presidency. However, I truly don’t think I know anybody whose calls I trust more than David's. And the even deeper compliment is that David is perhaps t...
Nov 04, 2024•47 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast Today, a close look at the history of a Pennsylvania town and how that history contains within it the story of the 2024 election. In September, Donald Trump claimed that the city of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, was being overrun by immigrants who brought violence, gangs, and economic destruction. Last month, The Atlantic's George Packer went to Charleroi to report on what's actually going on there, and how the issues most important to Charleroi—nativism, immigration, change, working-class decline, a...
Nov 01, 2024•57 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast My favorite sort of social phenomenon is something that seems normal to modern eyes that is actually incredibly unusual. We take it for granted that every presidential election is a nail-biter these days. But this era of close elections is deeply strange. We used to have blowouts all the time. In 1964, 1972, and 1984, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan, respectively, won by more than 15 points. This never happens anymore. Since the hanging-ballot mess of 2000, we’ve had historically close contests again and...
Oct 25, 2024•49 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast In 1900, the average US life expectancy was 47 years old. That's the current age of Tom Brady, Ryan Reynolds, and Shakira. But extraordinary advances in medicine and public health have surged lifespans in the US and throughout the world. The average American currently lives to about 79 years old. How long can this progress continue? As we have gotten so much better at allowing people to live to old age, how much progress have we made at confronting this ultimate boss of longevity? Today’s guest ...
Oct 18, 2024•56 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast 
