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The Ringer

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_

Plain English with Derek Thompson

Last week, an FBI investigation into gambling led to the arrest of several prominent basketball stars, raising questions about the state of legalized sports betting, which has enriched professional sports and sports media.

The problems with sports gambling extend far beyond the integrity of the game. A 2024 working paper from economists at UCLA, Harvard, and USC found that states that legalized sports gambling after the 2018 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court saw “a substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies. We also find that financial institutions respond to the reduced creditworthiness of consumers by restricting access to credit.” A separate analysis found that nearly one in five men aged 18-24 is on the spectrum of having a gambling problem.

There’s no question that sports betting has taken over sports. It’s all over ESPN, all over my favorite sports podcasts. This podcast is a part of The Ringer Podcast Network, which has close relationships with the sports book FanDuel and has several shows devoted to gambling. I listen to them. Quite a lot, actually.

It would be easier for me as the host of this episode if my position on gambling had the clarity of pure outrage. If I thought that gambling was a pure vice, a mere nuisance, and a total drag, I would say: Let’s just be done with it. On the opposite end, if I thought that legalized sports gambling posed no risk to bettors, didn’t threaten the integrity of professional sports, and represented an obvious improvement to the previous regime of black-market betting, I’d say: Ignore these moralizing bozos and place your 15-part parlay.

The trouble is that I don’t have the advantage of clear outrage on this issue. I think that sports gambling is fun. And I think that it threatens the integrity of professional sports. And I think that it ruins some people’s lives.

Today’s guest is Jonathan Cohen, the author of 'Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.' Like me, Jon is worried about the effect that legal sports gambling is having. Also like me, he sometimes bets on sports. Also like me, he listens to Ringer podcasts.

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

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Jonathan Cohen

Producers: Devon Baroldi
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The Problem With Sports Gambling

Bestselling author Michael Lewis joins the show to talk about how bubbles happen, the legacy of 'The Big Short' and the global financial crisis, 'Moneyball' and how the data analytics revolution conquered sports and entertainment, the difference between being a good investor and being a good investigative journalist, and the craft of writing.

Listen to the new audiobook of Michael's hit 'The Big Short' ⁠HERE⁠!

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

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Michael Lewis

Producers: Devon Baroldi and Kaya McMullen
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Michael Lewis on How the Global Financial Crisis Explains Trump, Crypto, and Everything Else

Today’s guest is Ethan Mollick. Ethan is a professor of management at Wharton, where he specializes in entrepreneurship and innovation. He is the author of the book 'Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI,' and his Substack, One Useful Thing, is the single most useful guide I have ever found to make sense of these tools and use them productively. But he’s also a deep thinker of the Alfred Chandler school of big ideas who wants to not only help individuals use the technology more efficiently but also understand what happens as tens of millions and billions of people use the technology to make themselves more productive or even, at times, obsolete.

Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Ethan MollickProducers: Devon Baroldi and Devon Renaldo
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What Happens When AI Learns to Do Our Jobs

By some measures, the Democratic Party has never been so unpopular as a political brand. While this fact obviously reflects some difficult realities for the party, it also creates an opportunity for Democrats to redefine what the party stands for. Derek talks to Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss about his idea for a digital dopamine tax, the art of politics in an attention economy, why moderate Democrats don't have big bold ideas, Derek's two-party theory for political success in America, and more.

Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Jake AuchinclossProducers: Devon Baroldi and Devon Renaldo
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Can "Touch-Grass Populism" Save America?

Two weeks ago, in one of our most popular podcasts of the year, the investor and author Paul Kedrosky explained why he thinks AI is a bubble. In the last few days, practically everybody seems to agree.I hate this. I don’t like feeling like my position is the same position as everybody else’s. Conventional wisdoms are often more conventional than wise, and I’ve started to wonder: Is there a bubble of people calling AI a bubble?Today’s guest says yes. Azeem Azhar is an investor and the author of the blog Exponential View. Like Paul, Azeem is a fantastic explainer and storyteller, and I’m satisfied that Plain English has now presented the strongest possible arguments for and against AI being a bubble. If you want to know where I land, you’ll just have to listen to the end of the show.

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

Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Azeem AzharProducers: Devon Baroldi and Kaya McMullen
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Everybody Thinks AI Is a Bubble. What If They’re Wrong?

In the second episode of our two-part miniseries on the future of entertainment, Derek goes from Hollywood to NYC to understand why Broadway musicals are in trouble. "With the cost of staging song-and-dance spectacles skyrocketing and audiences drawn to older hits, none of the musicals that opened last season have made a profit," The New York Times recently reported.

John Johnson, a major theater producer behind hits like 'Stereophonic' (the most Tony-nominated play in Broadway history) and George Clooney's 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' joins the show to discuss the future of live theater, the death of the middle in American entertainment, and how to cultivate good "taste" in popular art.

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

Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: John JohnsonProducers: Devon Baroldi and Kaya McMullen
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The Future of Entertainment, Part 2: What’s the Matter With Broadway?

The film and TV business has quietly—or, if you work in the industry, not so quietly—been in a depression for the past few years. Original TV work has plummeted. In 2024, Americans bought about 40 percent fewer movie tickets than they did in 2019, the year before the pandemic. The number of people employed in the motion picture industry in L.A. County has also declined by 40 percent. Those are catastrophic figures.

Few people have done more to shape my understanding of these developments than Ben Fritz, an entertainment industry reporter at The Wall Street Journal. We talk about what’s happened to the TV and film business in the past few years. What would it take to reverse this trend? And why are some people seeing this reversal as a positive sign for high-quality filmmaking?

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

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Ben Fritz

Producer: Devon Baroldi
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The Future of Entertainment, Part 1: Is Hollywood's Business Model Broken?

America is rich—richer than ever. Yet Americans are more anxious, lonelier, and less satisfied than people in many poorer nations. The 2025 World Happiness Report ranked the U.S. 24th in life satisfaction, its lowest on record. Maybe, as social scientists say, we’ve traded community for consumption. Today’s guest, Morgan Housel, thinks there’s a deeper reason money hasn’t bought us happiness. America, he says, is world-class at making money, but bad at spending it wisely. In his new book, The Art of Spending Money, Housel argues that we’re burdened not only by visible debt—mortgages, credit cards, loans—but also by invisible debt: desire. In this episode, Derek talks with Morgan—the author of The Psychology of Money and Same as Ever—about how money, comparison, and human nature shape happiness.

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

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Morgan Housel

Producer: Devon Baroldi
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Why Money Doesn't Buy Happiness in America

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

Links:

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/29/if-ai-can-diagnose-patients-what-are-doctors-for

 https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/why-ai-isnt-replacing-radiologists?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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Is AI Really About to Solve Human Disease?

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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How America Became a Nation of "Free Speech Hypocrites"

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 other places can do to protect people from the inevitability of future disasters.

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

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Robinson Meyer
Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links: 

Could More Controlled Burns Have Helped? 

5 Startups Working on LA Fires 

What Started The Fires? 

Why LA’s Fires Are Exceptionally Hard to Fight 

Does climate change make the Santa Ana winds worse?

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The L.A. Fires: How They Happened, Climate Change’s Role, and What the City Must Do Now

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