Plain English with Derek Thompson – Details, episodes & analysis
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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. Watch 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! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson
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The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories
Season 3 · Episode 53
vendredi 6 septembre 2024 • Duration 01:18:07
Are conspiracy theories more popular than ever? Are Americans more conspiratorial than ever? Are conservatives more conspiratorial than liberals? Joseph Uscinski is a political scientist at the University of Miami and one of the nation's preeminent experts on the psychology of conspiratorial thinking and the history of conspiracy theories in America. He has some counterintuitive and surprising answers to these questions. Today, he and Derek discuss—and debate—the psychology and politics of modern conspiratorial thinking.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Joseph Uscinski
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Links
Uscinski's research page: https://people.miami.edu/profile/60b5fb062f4f266afb6739ec21657c74
"The psychological and political correlates of conspiracy theory beliefs" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25617-0
"Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30679368/
"Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric) vulnerability to misinformation" https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/right-and-left-partisanship-predicts-asymmetric-vulnerability-to-misinformation/
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"Exercise May Be the Single Most Potent Medical Intervention Ever Known"
Season 3 · Episode 52
vendredi 30 août 2024 • Duration 57:57
Exercise is a conundrum. On the one hand, physical activity is clearly one of the best interventions for preventing physical disease and mental suffering. On the other hand, scientists don't really understand how it works inside the body or what exactly running, jumping, lifting, and squatting do to our tissues and organs. That's finally changing. Euan Ashley, a professor of genomics and cardiovascular medicine and the chair of the Stanford Department of Medicine, is a member of a new research consortium that studies rats and humans to understand the molecular changes induced by exercise. Today we talk about the earliest findings from this new consortium, how exercise might have disparate effects in men versus women, why nature’s most effective cardiovascular intervention also seems to be nature’s most effective mental health intervention, as well as whether it will one day be possible to identify the molecular basis of exercise precisely enough to develop exercise pills that give us the benefits of working out without the sweat.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Euan Ashley
Producer: Devon Baroldi
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"People Feel Lied To": The White House, the Media, and the Joe Biden Blame Game
Season 3 · Episode 43
vendredi 5 juillet 2024 • Duration 58:18
Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance has created a crisis for the Democratic Party and a set of interlocking debates about whether the White House—or the White House media—covered up his cognitive decline. The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich, who first wrote that Biden should drop out of the race two years ago, joins to discuss Biden campaign strategy and the hypocrisy of many Democrats who refused to state publicly what they knew privately: that Biden's age-related blunders were getting more serious. Then we are joined by the busiest man in media, Alex Thompson, political correspondent of Axios, who has absolutely dominated this story in the past week. As a group, we talk about Biden’s age, the Democratic campaign strategy—Project "Bubble Wrap"—that is blowing up in their faces, the failures of the political press and Democratic operatives to see what’s in front of their noses, and the chances that Kamala Harris will imminently replace Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Mark Leibovich & Alex Thompson
Producer: Devon Baroldi
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The AI Revolution Could Be Bigger and Weirder Than We Can Imagine
Season 2 · Episode 23
mardi 21 mars 2023 • Duration 01:01:13
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.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Charlie Warzel
Producer: Devon Manze
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MAILBAG: Why Does the Internet Make Us Depressed? Where Does Good Writing Come From? Is College Worth It Anymore?
Season 2 · Episode 22
vendredi 17 mars 2023 • Duration 38:53
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
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The SVB Debacle: The Biggest Myths, the Out-of-Control Blame Game, and the Worst Takes
Season 2 · Episode 21
mercredi 15 mars 2023 • Duration 42:29
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 on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson
Producer: Devon Manze
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Silicon Valley Bank Collapse FAQ: Whose Fault Is It? How Can We Stop a Bank Panic? What Comes Next?
Season 2 · Episode 20
lundi 13 mars 2023 • Duration 38:56
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
Producer: Devon Manze
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"Industrial Policy" Is the Hottest Idea in Economics. What Could Go Wrong?
Season 2 · Episode 19
vendredi 10 mars 2023 • Duration 51:26
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 industrial policy is utterly necessary to help the U.S. build an abundance of computer chips and green energy infrastructure. Greg Ip, the chief economics commentator at the Wall Street Journal, helps us separate fear from fact as we talk about industrial policy.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Greg Ip
Producer: Devon Manze
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How the Media Failed Its COVID Test: The Truth Behind the Lab Leak and Masking Debates
Season 2 · Episode 18
mardi 7 mars 2023 • Duration 01:34:40
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 masks work—is so hard to answer. Today’s guests are Dan Engber, a science writer and editor at The Atlantic who has chronicled the ups and downs of the media’s relationship to the lab leak. And Jason Abaluck, a Yale economist who has conducted masking research in Bangladesh.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Dan Engber & Jason Abaluck
Producer: Devon Manze
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Why Are American Teens So Unhappy? How Do We Solve This Crisis?
Season 2 · Episode 17
vendredi 3 mars 2023 • Duration 55:26
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 psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center, and chief medical officer at Fort Health.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Matthew Biel
Producer: Devon Manze
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