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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

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"

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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What’s the Matter With America’s Food?

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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This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst

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 is Professor S. Jay Olshansky, from the school of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. We talk about progress and stasis in the most important science project in human history: how to increase human life.

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

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: S. Jay Olshansky
Producer: Devon Baroldi

LINKS:

"Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century" [link]

"If Humans Were Built to Last," an illustration of what people would look like if they were optimally designed to live to 100 [link]

"Child and Infant Mortality," from Our World in Data [link]

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Is Radical Human Life Extension Possible?

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