Plain English with Derek Thompson

Latest Episodes:

Is AI Really About to Solve Human Disease? Oct 03, 2025

Show notes

I’ve had the privilege of talking to many brilliant people about artificial intelligence. And when you ask them to imagine the most beneficial consequences of this technology, they almost always give the same answer: medicine. The dream is dazzling. Superintelligent AI will cure stubborn diseases and disorders—cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s. It will diagnose all our illnesses, design new lifesaving drugs, accelerate clinical trials, and pair with wearables to fight chronic illness and extend our health spans. But which of these promises are realistic? Which are outlandish hype? And what, exactly, can AI do for us in medicine right now? To separate fact from fantasy, I talk with Lloyd Minor, dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Lloyd Minor

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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How America Became a Nation of "Free Speech Hypocrites" Sep 30, 2025

Show notes

The past few weeks have marked a low point for free speech principles in America. The head of the FCC openly threatened ABC for the language of a comedian. The president told a reporter that networks that are "against" him should have their licenses revoked. The vice president went on TV and told Americans to turn in their colleagues if they spoke ill of Charlie Kirk. And many have. After Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University, posted that “if you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Within hours, Libs of TikTok, a social media account, posted her message publicly, Elon Musk retweeted it, and, with the approval of the White House, she was fired.

Conservatives claim that Democrats fired first. They say it was the campus left that got "cancel culture" rolling. It was Joe Biden who pressured—or jawboned—the social media companies to take down misinformation, in violation of free expression. It was Democrats who suppressed information on the Hunter Biden laptop.

So what can we say fairly and honestly about the state of the First Amendment? Is the Trump administration uniquely perverse? Are we all hypocrites? And why does it seem like so many members of each party can’t wait to use the machinery of the state to limit the speech of their political opponent? Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, joins the show to discuss.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Greg Lukianoff

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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What’s the Matter With America’s Food? Sep 26, 2025

Show notes

In the past few weeks, we’ve done several episodes on obesity, GLP-1 drugs, and nutrition science. What we haven’t talked about as much is the politics of food.

And today’s guests say: If you really want to understand why Americans are so unhealthy, you have to see that the problem is not just our willpower, and it’s not just our food itself. It’s our food policies.

Kevin Hall was a former top nutrition researcher at the NIH who retired after accusing RFK Jr. and the Department of Health and Human Services of censoring a report that questioned their description of ultra-processed foods. Julia Belluz is a longtime nutrition and health journalist. Together, they’ve written a new book, 'Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us.'

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guests: Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst Sep 23, 2025

Show notes

This year, American tech companies will spend $300 billion to $400 billion on artificial intelligence, which is in nominal dollars more than any group of companies have ever spent to do anything. Notably, these companies are not remotely close to earning $400 billion on artificial intelligence.

That's why you’re starting to hear some people wonder if the AI build-out is turning into the mother of all economic bubbles.

The prospect of an AI bubble should scare us. Roughly half of last quarter's GDP growth came from infrastructure spending on AI, and more than half of stock market appreciation in the last few years has come from companies associated with AI. If the AI spending project blows up in the next few years, as our next guest says it might, the implications for technology, the economy, and politics would be immense.

Paul Kedrosky is an investor and writer. Today we talk about the AI capex boom: how it works, who’s financing it, how its financing works. We put the AI build-out in historical context. And then we spend a great deal of time walking through what could go wrong and when it might go wrong.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Paul Kedrosky

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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The Jimmy Kimmel Saga and America's Free-Speech Crisis Sep 19, 2025

Show notes

Matt Belloni, the host of the Town podcast and the author of Puck’s 'What I’m Hearing' newsletter, joins the show to talk about Jimmy Kimmel's punishment, what happened behind the scenes at ABC and Disney, Bob Iger's legacy, and what this means at a moment when media companies are bending the knee to the Trump administration, which is clearly using its position to punish free speech despite rising to power by promising to do the opposite.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Matt Belloni

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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If GLP-1 Drugs Are Good for Everything, Should We All Be on Them? Sep 16, 2025

Show notes

To read more of Derek's reporting on GLP-1 drugs, you can subscribe to his Substack here.

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound don't just help with Type 2 diabetes and weight loss. They seem to curb alcohol, cocaine, and tobacco use among addicts. In some studies, they prevent strokes, heart attacks, chronic kidney disease, sleep apnea, and Parkinson's disease. They’re associated with a lower risk of several cancers, including pancreatic cancer and multiple myeloma. Arthritic patients on the drugs experienced relief from knee pain that was “on par with opioid drugs.” A small study found that they reduce migraine headaches by 50 percent. And emerging research suggests they might even slow the rate of memory loss among people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Is all of this real? And if it’s real, how is one drug doing so many different things? And if it is doing all those things, why shouldn’t we be developing versions of the drug for just about everyone?

Today we have two guests: David D’Alessio, chief of endocrinology and metabolism at the Duke University School of Medicine; and Randy Seeley, a professor of surgery, internal medicine, and nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan. We talk about how these drugs work—why they seem to do everything—and how our understanding of them could make them better, more effective, more broadly useful.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guests: David D’Alessio and Randy Seeley

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Disclosure: Dr. Seeley has received research support from several pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, Diasome, and Amgen.

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Charlie Kirk's Killing and America's Age of "Salad-Bar Extremism" Sep 12, 2025

Show notes

In the past few years, we have witnessed a frightening spiral of political violence. We’ve seen the killing of Charlie Kirk; the killing of Brian Thompson, the health insurance executive; the assassination of a Minnesota House Speaker and her husband; the shooting of a Minnesota state senator and his wife; several attempted assassinations of Donald Trump; an attack on Nancy Pelosi’s home and husband; a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer; and calls to lynch Vice President Mike Pence on January 6. As The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance writes, this is looking to be "an age of assassinations."

LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic, has written tens of thousands of words, including cover stories for the magazine, on the history of political violence in the U.S. Today, we talk about media coverage of political violence before getting to the hardest question: How can America survive a period of mass delusion, deep division, and political violence without seeing the permanent dissolution of the ties that bind us?

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Adrienne LaFrance

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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America in the Age of Diagnosis Sep 09, 2025

Show notes

America is sicker than ever. That’s what the data says, anyway.

Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses have soared. Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, bipolar disorder among American youth grew by a factor of 40, while the number of children diagnosed with ADHD increased by a factor of 7. Rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression have soared, too.

Perhaps in previous decades doctors missed millions of cases of illness that we’re now catching. Or perhaps, as the New York Times writer David Wallace Wells has written, “we are not getting sicker—we are attributing more to sickness.”

We used to be merely forgetful. Now we have ADHD. We used to lack motivation. Now we’re depressed. We used to be introverted. Now we experience social anxiety.

Today’s guest is Suzanne O’Sullivan, a neurologist and the author of 'The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker'. O’Sullivan argues that too many doctors today are pathologizing common symptoms in a way that’s changing the experience of the body for the worse. When doctors turn healthy people into patients, it’s not always clear if they’re reducing the risk of future disease or introducing anxiety and potentially harmful treatments to a patient who's basically fine.

Rather than see the age of diagnosis as something all good or all bad—a mitzvah or a disease—I want to see it as a social phenomenon, something that is good and bad and all around us.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Suzanne O’Sullivan

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Trumponomics Explained, Part 2: The Enshittification of American Power Sep 05, 2025

Show notes

In the second of our two-episode series on Donald Trump, economics, and power, we talk to Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins. Farrell has written extensively on how the United States has in the last few years weaponized its economic power to force other countries to do its bidding, through sanctions or the freezing of bank accounts. Today, we consider the many ways that Trump has weaponized the office of the presidency against American interests and how his authoritarian style matches up against China as both countries race toward superintelligence.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Henry Farrell

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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What Is Trumponomics? Part 1: How Donald Trump Is Breaking American Capitalism Sep 03, 2025

Show notes

Today is the first of two interviews this week trying to answer this question: What is Trumponomics?

From the 1980s to the 2010s, it was generally assumed that Republicans and Democrats had settled differences in economic policy. Republicans wanted lower taxes and less spending on welfare. Democrats wanted higher taxes and more social spending.

Reality didn’t always conform to those differences. George H.W. Bush famously raised some taxes, and Bill Clinton famously reduced some welfare spending. But generally speaking, the socialists voted for Democrats and the corporate libertarians and free-market folks found their home in the GOP.

What’s interesting about Trump's theory of power and economics is that he doesn’t just scramble this divide. He obliterates it.

Some of Trump’s measures are so classically Republican, you could imagine the ghost of Ronald Reagan signing off on them. After all, his signature legislative accomplishment in both terms are two huge corporate income tax cuts. But when Trump announced that the government was taking a stake in Intel, Bernie Sanders cheered the news and Gavin Newsom called him a socialist.

Trump has single-handedly instituted the biggest tariffs in 100 years—tariffs that are so unusual and extralegal that a federal court just ruled that most of them are, in fact, against the law. He’s waging war on the Federal Reserve, grabbing at an institution that has historically enjoyed independence when it comes to setting interest rates and managing monetary policy.

Trumponomics is capitalist and socialist; it’s obsessed with defeating China and also obsessive about copying China; it’s sometimes focused on keeping America from getting ripped off and sometimes focused on issues so personal they have nothing to do with the national interest at all.

Today’s guest is Greg Ip, the chief economics commentator at The Wall Street Journal. According to Greg, the best way to see clearly what Trump is up to is to see his economic policy as what he calls “state capitalism.”

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Greg Ip

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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