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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Americans have never had more access to social technology. It’s easier to talk to friends and family members hundreds of miles away; easier to see their faces; and easier to find single people to date. But if you ask them, Americans today will say they are as lonely as or lonelier than any time on record. The amount of time all Americans spend alone has increased every year for about a decade. What's going on? Today’s episode is about the longest study on happiness in U.S. history — the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Our guests are the study's director and associate director, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. They are the authors of a new book, 'The Good Life,' about what their study should teach all of us about the secret to a long and fulfilling life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How does technology shape art? Why has songwriting become more of a visual skill in the 21st century? Why are today's hit songs shorter than songs from any period since the Beatles? What happened to the guitar solo intro—and the classic rock genre in general? How did rap and hip-hop take over the charts? Derek welcomes the musician, writer, and data analyst Chris Dalla Riva to discuss the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that music hits have changed since the 1960s. 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: Chris Dalla Riva Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Large language models like ChatGPT and Bing’s chatbot can tell stories. They can analyze the effects of agricultural AI on American and Chinese farms. They can pass medical licensing exams, summarize 1,000-page documents, and score a 147 on an IQ test. That’s the 99.9th percentile. They’re also liars. They don't know what year it is. They recommend books that don’t exist. They write nonsense on request. Today's guest, New York Times journalist Kevin Roose, spent a few hours last week talking to Bing. The conversation quickly went off the rails in the strangest of ways. I am convinced that AI is going to be one of the most important stories of the decade. We are looking at something almost like the discovery of an alien intelligence. Except, because these technologies are trained on us, they aren’t extraterrestrial at all. If anything, they’re intra-terrestrial. We’ve taken the entire history of human culture—all our texts, all our images, maybe all of our music and art too—and fed it to a machine that we’ve built. Now it’s talking back to us. Isn't that fascinating? Isn't it kind of scary? Host: Derek Thompson  Guest: Kevin Roose Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the first five decades of the 20th century, the number of serial killers in the U.S. remained at a very low level. But between the 1950s and 1960s, the number of serial killers tripled. Between the 1960s and 1970s, they tripled again. In the 1980s and 1990s, they kept rising. And then, just as suddenly as the serial killer emerged as an American phenomenon, he (and it really is mostly a he) nearly disappeared. What happened to the American serial killers? And what does this phenomenon say about American society, criminology, and technology? Today's guest is James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern University. The author of 18 books, he has been publishing on this subject since before 1974, the year that the FBI coined the term "serial killer." If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: James Alan Fox Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since a big white Chinese spy balloon floated across the ocean and into U.S. airspace, the United States has shot down four objects over North American skies. What are we looking at, and what are we shooting at? Are these objects American? Are they Chinese? Are they human? To tell the full story of this bizarre month in aerial objects—from the balloon to the aerial shoot-out to the UFO freak-out—we’ve got two guests: former Atlantic correspondent and Substack writer James Fallows and the science writer and noted extraterrestrial-object researcher Mick West. 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 Guests: James Fallows & Mick West Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last fall, three-quarters of voters told CNN that the U.S. was in a recession. A Bloomberg economic model said that the odds of a recession by the fall of 2023 were 100 percent. But we’re not in a recession. The unemployment rate is lower than any month since the 1960s. Real disposable income is growing. The economy is expanding. Consumer spending is strong. Even housing seems to be rebounding. In today's episode, Derek explains the origins of the great American recession myth, and Bloomberg writer Conor Sen breaks down the housing turnaround that could define the 2023 economy. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Conor Sen Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the past 50 years, Americans have basically responded to the case against eating animals by eating more animals. The share of Americans who call themselves vegan or vegetarian hasn’t increased in the past 20 years. But a few years ago, I was certain that we were near peak meat, thanks to the rise of plant-based “meat” products—like Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat sausages. In 2019 and 2020, I looked like a genius, as meat-substitute products surged. But then came the crash. Beyond Meat’s publicly traded stock is down more than 80 percent from its all-time high. Impossible Burger has announced layoffs of more than 20 percent of its staff. So what happened? Today’s guest is Deena Shanker, who wrote a blockbuster story for Bloomberg on this very topic. We talk about the spectacular rise and fall of fake meat—and what it tells us about food, taste, politics, and technology. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Deena Shanker Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If we’re being honest, the whole thing is kind of funny. A Chinese spy balloon floated across the U.S. Nobody died, unless we count the balloon itself. In a saner age, this story would be over. But balloongate offers a useful hook to evaluate the relationship between the U.S. and China during a period of extraordinarily high tensions. These are the most powerful countries in the world, the two largest economies in the history of the world, and they are currently undergoing a kind of conscious uncoupling that is having a huge effect on our economies, politics, and planet. Juliette Kayyem is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and former government official. James Palmer is the deputy editor at Foreign Policy. 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 Guests: Juliette Kayyem & James Palmer  Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve got a double-barrelled podcast for you. Jeanna Smialek, economics reporter for the ‘New York Times,’ joins us to break down the debt-ceiling showdown that’s enveloping Washington. Plus, economist Jason Furman is back to rehash his debt-ceiling grievances from the Obama administration, then answer some deeper questions about the U.S. debt trajectory and the state of the economy today. But first: a new way to think about the debt ceiling and fears of the U.S. government running up the tab. 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 Guests: Jeanna Smialek and Jason Furman Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

"Productivity is a trap. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved work-life balance. The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse." That's how Oliver Burkeman, the author of 'Four Thousand Weeks,' explains our relationship to happiness and time. In this episode, he and Derek talk about his philosophy, the downside of constantly living for some future achievement, goals versus habits, and making peace with our finitude. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Oliver Burkeman Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“The story of 2022 was the emergence of AI," wrote Ben Thompson, the author of the Stratechery newsletter and podcast. "It seems clear to me that this is a new epoch in technology.” Ben and Derek talk about ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, the state of generative AI, and how the biggest tech companies will try to wrangle this fascinating suite of new tools. 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: Ben Thompson  Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Derek breaks down the biggest economic mystery of the moment: Why are the most successful tech companies collectively laying off more than 130,000 people if the overall unemployment rate is still historically low? Then award-winning Puck journalist William Cohan rejoins the podcast to talk about the biggest unanswered questions swirling around disgraced billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, his FTX bankruptcy proceedings, and his forthcoming criminal case. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: William Cohan Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We have historically thought about weight as the mere outcome of our deliberate choices about diet and exercise. We have not typically thought about weight like a disease. But in the past 18 months, there’s been an extraordinary revolution in weight-loss medication that's putting in our hands a therapy that can help people easily shed weight without major side effects. You may have heard these drugs go by the name Wegovy or Ozempic. What happens when you take a country obsessed with self-image and diet and tell them that the mystery of weight loss has now been reduced to a daily injection? You change a lot more than body mass index. You change society. Today’s guest is Susan Z. Yanovski. She is the co-director of the Office of Obesity Research and the program director of the Division of Digestive Diseases and Nutrition at NIH. We talk about the stakes of anti-obesity medication, why diet and exercise doesn’t work for so many people, how these weight-loss drugs could help American health care, strain American insurance, and revolutionize America’s sense of willpower, responsibility, and diet. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Susan Z. Yanovski Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today’s episode is about what Americans don’t get about food—and the historical origins of our diet delusions. Our guest is Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist who has researched and written on obesity and diet. He explains why scientists still haven't arrived at a consensus on obesity, why he thinks the conventional wisdom about calories and fat is wrong, what he thinks is really going on, and why the history of diet advice has been so wrong in the last half-century. On Friday, we'll continue the conversation on diet and obesity with an episode on the next generation of weight-loss medication, which could change the way America thinks about self-image and obesity forever. 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: David Ludwig Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We've done several podcasts on America's declining fertility rate, and why South Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world. But we've never done an episode on the subject quite like this one. Today we go deep on the psychology of having children and not having children, and the cultural revolution behind the decline in birthrates in America and the rest of the world. The way we think about dating, marriage, kids, and family is changing radically in a very short period of time. And we are just beginning to reckon with the causes and consequences of that shift. In the new book, 'What Are Children For,' Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman say a new "parenthood ambivalence" is sweeping the world. In today's show, they persuade Derek that this issue is about more than the economic trends he tends to focus on when he discusses this issue. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last year was a bloodbath for media of all stripes. Netflix crashed, the advertising market cratered, Disney fired a CEOBob and replaced him with a CEOBob, and meanwhile, the domestic box office for films remained dormant. Outside of a handful of huge hits like 'Top Gun: Maverick,' the movie business is struggling to get people to see original movies that aren’t just the latest installation of familiar franchises. But one mistake that media people, like me, can often make is that we mistake current trends for permanent trends. So I thought what we’d do today is run through several predictions and provocations that I’m hearing from my friends and sources in the media and entertainment space, throw all of them at a smart media analyst, and see what they have to say about the prevailing wisdom. Today’s smart media analyst is return guest Rich Greenfield from Lightshed. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Rich Greenfield Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We should be living in a golden age of creativity in science and technology. We know more about the universe and ourselves than we did in any other period in history, and with easy access to superior research tools, our pace of discovery should be accelerating. But as one group of researchers from Stanford put it: “Everywhere we look we find that ideas … are getting harder to find.” Another paper found that “scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the early 1970s,” and yet another concluded that “new ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did.” As regular listeners of this podcast know, I am obsessed with this topic—why it seems like in industries as different as music and film and physics, new ideas are losing ground. It is harder to sell an original script, harder to make an original hit song, and harder to publish a groundbreaking paper, and while these trends are NOT all the same, they rhyme in a way I can’t stop thinking about. How did we build a world where new ideas are so endangered? This year, a new study titled “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time” inches us closer to an explanation for why this is happening in science. The upshot is that any given paper today is much less likely to become influential than a paper in the same field from several decades ago. Progress is slowing down, not just in one or two places, but across many domains of science and technology. Today, I speak to one of the study’s coauthors. Russell Funk is a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. We talk about the decline of progress in science, why it matters, and why it’s happening—and we give special attention to a particular theory of mine, which is that the incentive structure of modern science encourages too much research that doesn’t serve any purpose except to get published. In other words, science has a bullsh*t paper problem. And because science is the wellspring from which all progress flows, its crap problem is our problem. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Russell Funk Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson of Ritholtz Wealth Management rejoin the pod to talk about what they learned from the topsy-turvy 2022 economy and make predictions about 2023 markets. 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 Guests: Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This has been an amazing year for the show, and I’m so grateful for everybody who has listened. I’m off the last two weeks of the year but I wanted to keep something in your feed over the holidays, so this week I’m reboosting one of our most popular episodes of the year. Maybe you listened and want to listen again. Maybe you missed this one, and want to check it out. Or you’re looking at this feed for the first time and trying to figure out whether this is your kind of show. I think these episodes offer a great snapshot of what we try to do here on 'Plain English.' Range widely across topics. Synthesize complicated ideas. Frame breaking news and big ideas in ways that you’ll remember when the show is over. And do it all relatively quickly. No BS. No filler. An espresso shot of news analysis. In today’s episode, I talk with the author Chuck Klosterman about why society has gotten so negative, ranging from TV and film to politics and social media. Maybe the most wide-ranging conversation of the year and, in terms of online reception, probably the single episode that I got the most positive feedback from … Ironically. I hope you enjoy! Happy holidays, and if you feel like giving this show a small gift, head to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star rating and review. It goes a long way. See you in the new year! Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This has been an amazing year for the show, and I’m so grateful for everybody who has listened. I’m off the last two weeks, but I wanted to keep something in your feed over the holidays, so this week I’m re-boosting one of our most popular episodes of the year. Maybe you listened and want to listen again. Maybe you missed this one and want to check it out. Or you’re looking at this feed for the first time and trying to figure out if this is your kind of show. I think these episodes offer a great snapshot of what we try to do here on 'Plain English.' Range widely across topics. Synthesize complicated ideas. Frame breaking news and big ideas in ways that you’ll remember when the show is over. And do it all relatively quickly. No BS. No filler. An espresso shot of news analysis. In today’s episode, I talk with The Ringer’s Ryen Russillo about the most impressive sports statistic of all time. This is of course wildly subjective. And that’s the fun of it. Happy holidays, and if you feel like giving this show a small gift, head to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star rating and review. It goes a long way. See you in the new year! Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ryen Russillo Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Derek talks to economist and writer Eli Dourado about the most exciting scientific and technological discoveries of the year, from the AI toys that everybody seems to be playing with to lesser-known breakthroughs in bioscience, clean energy hardware, and precise atomic manipulation. Due to the holidays, we will be skipping our Friday episode this week. However, we’ll be back next Tuesday to revisit one of our favorite interviews from the past year as we inch closer to 2023. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Eli Dourado Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the last 50 years, average sperm counts have fallen by 50 percent. This isn’t just happening in the U.S. or Europe or Asia. It seems to be happening everywhere. If the current rate of decline continues, researchers concluded, the average male sperm count will fall so low that the typical guy in every advanced economy will be infertile by 2050. Harvard's Jorge Chavarro, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology, breaks down the data on declining sperm counts and tells us what it means, what might be causing it, what men can reasonably do to avoid it, and how bad it could get. 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: Jorge Chavarro Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

4 Day Week Global is a nonprofit organization that recently conducted a trial with 33 companies and 900 workers that replaced the typical five-day week with a four-day work week with no change in pay. After the six-month trial ended, 97 percent of employees who responded said they didn’t want to go back to five days per week, and most employers rated the overall experience 9 out of 10. The pandemic showed us that so much about the way we work is an accident of history, solidified by familiarity and the passage of time. Maybe the office is where we should do all white-collar work. Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe a two-day weekend is all people need to feel perfectly recharged. Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe, in some cases, four is greater than five. Juliet Schor is an economist at Boston College and a lead researcher on the four-day work week trial. We talked about how work and the economy might be reorganized in her vision of a four-day work week, why even employers might appreciate an extra day off, and why Americans’ relationship to work, time, and well-being needs some kind of revolution. 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: Juliet Schor Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One year ago, we had Anne Applebaum on the podcast to talk about her essay, "The Bad Guys Are Winning." And I think you could have made an argument that this was the most important story in geopolitics. Across the world, the rise of authoritarianism—in Russia, China, Turkey, Venezuela, India, and even right here in the U.S. authoritarianism was ascendant. Illiberalism was rising. Anti-democratic forces were assembling. But at this very moment, the opposite narrative seems like it might just be the most important story in the world. The fall of the authoritarians. Look at China, where the ruler Xi Jinping's "zero-COVID" policy is sparking a wave of protests. Look at Russia, which is losing its war against Ukraine. Look at Iran, which is rife with protests for women’s rights. Today’s guest is Francis Fukuyama, the author of the very famous (and very misunderstood) book, 'The End of History and the Last Man.' In this episode we take a first-class tour of what’s happening in China, Russia, Iran, and the U.S., ending with some thoughts on the future of liberalism in America. 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: Francis Fukuyama Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Americans have never spent so much time alone. And alone time is rising sharply for every demographic—young and old, male and female, white and non-white, metro and rural. But is aloneness the same as loneliness? And can we really blame technology for it? Derek talks with economist Bryce Ward about the causes and consequences of the rise of alone time in America. 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: Bryce Ward Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today’s episode is about the science of breathing—from the evolution of our sinuses and palate, to the downsides of mouth breathing and the upsides of nasal breathing, to specific breath techniques that you can use to reduce stress and fall asleep fast. Our guest is James Nestor, the author of the bestselling book 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: James Nestor Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today’s episode is a Thanksgiving feast of corporate scandal and media gossip. Derek kicks things off with a big-picture theory for why everything in tech and media seems to be falling apart at the same time. Then, we turn to the corporate shocker of the week: Bob Iger stunned the entertainment and media world by announcing his return to Disney as CEO, not even three years after the coronation of his hand-picked replacement, Bob Chapek. Matt Belloni of The Ringer and Puck joins to respond to some hot takes about the future of the streaming wars and the Mouse. Then, Derek revisits the FTX scandal. We're joined by Matthew Yglesias, author of the Slow Boring newsletter, to take a fresh look at the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried by analyzing the philosophy he supported, or at least claimed to support: effective altruism. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Matthew Belloni and Matthew Yglesias  Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today’s episode is about China’s turn toward authoritarianism—and why it might be one of the most important stories in the world. If you don’t know a lot about China—if you’ve been interested or astonished from afar by its Zero-COVID policy or its alarming saber-rattling toward Taiwan—then you and I are in the same boat. I am not at all an expert on China. But I am fascinated and alarmed by the country’s politics and by the character of its leader, Xi Jinping. Today’s guest is an expert in all things China: Bill Bishop, who writes the incredibly popular Sinocism newsletter. And he has a new podcast out called 'Sharp China.' In this episode, we discuss my biggest fears and questions: What is happening to the Chinese economy right now? Is Xi Jinping a tyrant? And if he chooses to invade Taiwan, is that World War III? Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Bill Bishop  Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Derek shares his thoughts on the meltdown of crypto exchange FTX and the disgrace of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, before welcoming veteran finance journalist William D. Cohan to discuss the history of finance frauds, what comes next for FTX, the media’s relationship to CEO royalty, and his new book, 'Power Failure,' on the rise and fall of GE. Host: Derek Thompson  Guest: William D. Cohan Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The polls were right; the vibes were wrong. Democrats seem to have blocked the Republican wave by riding “Dobbs and democracy.” Trump lost, and extremism lost. DeSantis won, and Florida is a red state now. Also: Why is America so terrible at counting votes? Host: Derek Thompson Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Musk regime is off to a chaotic start at Twitter. In barely a week or two of ownership, Elon has already overseen a collapse in advertising revenue, announced a pivot to subscriptions, attempted to fire about half of the staff, and then attempted to rehire some of the fired staff. It would be one thing if Elon were flailing at Twitter while the rest of social media was on a rocket ship. The opposite is true. At Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on a truly audacious and possibly suicidal plan to spend somewhere between $100 billion and $200 billion building out a metaverse platform. What the hell is happening at these companies and, beyond the lurid details and gossip, what does it say about the larger ecosystem of social media? Today’s guests are the co-hosts of the new New York Times tech podcast 'Hard Fork': Kevin Roose is a reporter at the Times and a frequent guest on this show. And Casey Newton is the author of the Platformer newsletter. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Kevin Roose and Casey Newton Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Americans are unusually conspiratorial as a nation. But in the last week, we have really outdone ourselves. The beating of Paul Pelosi—husband of the Speaker of the House—by a Q-Anon conspiracy theorist led to even more unhinged conspiracies about the media. Kanye West has been all over the news spreading nonsense theories about Jewish control of the world, and in basketball Kyrie Irving published a social media post about a book and movie that featured antisemitic tropes and questioned the Holocaust. What makes certain conspiracy theories so successful? Why do conspiracy theories thrive in 21st century America? And aren't some conspiracy theories ... actually true? Like, what's the deal with aliens, and 1950s UFOs, and the assassination of JFK, and government projects on astral projection and military psychic powers? It's all here in today's episode, featuring the hosts of the popular podcast Stuff They Don't Want You to Know. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Noel Brown, Ben Bowlin and Matt Frederick Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Skyrocketing mortgage rates. Rent prices falling by their fastest pace in years (from their highest inflation rate in decades). Buyers and sellers are freaked out. What the hell is going on with American real estate?Today is a very special crossover event, featuring one of my favorite finance podcasts: 'Odd Lots' hosted by Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal. Most of what I think I know about the housing market is a river that flows from the headwater that is 'Odd Lots' and the online commentary of Tracy and Joe. So, this is a thrill for me. I hope it’s a thrill for you. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’re in a moment in world history where a lot of big global paradigms are dying. For decades, Europe was basically peaceful. That paradigm has gone up in smoke. For decades, the relationship between the U.S. and China was one of mutual dependency and growth. That paradigm, I think, is changing rapidly as the U.S. moves toward a new industrial policy and China shrinks inside a shell of authoritarianism. And for decades, low interest rates shaped the world—the companies that got started, the growth of the internet, and the ability of governments to run massive deficits. And that paradigm is going away. Global markets are a mess right now, and I wanted to bring back one of my favorite writers to talk about it. He is Morgan Housel, a partner at Collaborative Fund and the author of the bestselling book The Psychology of Money. We talk about what happened to the markets in the last 18 months, the legacy of zero-bound interest rates, and inflation—but that’s just maybe the first 10 minutes. The bulk of this episode is about deeper questions: What is investing for? Does making more money really make us happy? And why do so many rich people seem so miserable? If you like this episode, please leave us a rating on Spotify or a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. If you don’t like this episode, tell us why at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Morgan Housel Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

About a week ago, a new global news organization launched called Semafor. Ben Smith is its cofounder and editor-in-chief. We offer a brief history of news media in the 21st century and talk about why in some ways the news business is more like the 19th century than the 20th. We discuss what to say to investors when you’re trying to get their money to start a new media company, and debate why TikTok is the biggest undercovered media story in the world. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ben Smith Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’re coming down to the wire, and Democrats' hopes of holding onto the Senate and the House are fading fast. Two months ago, the story was that Democrats seemed poised to pull off an upset and hold onto the Senate despite the fact that the party in power almost always loses seats in the midterm election. But now, the Senate looks like a toss-up. It’s not just Democrats who are facing challenges this year—pollsters are too. Error margins are rising as fewer people are responding to survey calls. That means we’re flying half-blind out there: Political campaigns, commentators, and voters can’t be sure that the polling averages that they’re seeing in the news are an accurate reflection of reality. Today's guest is Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster and the co-founder of Echelon Insights. We discuss the closest races in Georgia and Pennsylvania, whether Donald Trump is an overall help or hindrance to the GOP, and why the golden age of polling is over. 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: Kristen Soltis Anderson Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What do most people not understand about the news media? I would say two things. First: The most important bias in news media is not left or right. It’s a bias toward negativity and catastrophe. Second: That while it would be convenient to blame the news media exclusively for this bad-news bias, the truth is that the audience is just about equally to blame. The news has never had better tools for understanding exactly what gets people to click on stories. That means what people see in the news is more responsive than ever to aggregate audience behavior. If you hate the news, what you are hating is in part a collective reflection in the mirror. If you put these two facts together, you get something like this: The most important bias in the news media is the bias that news makers and news audiences share toward negativity and catastrophe. Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast Good on Paper, joins to discuss a prominent fake fact in the news — and the psychological and media forces that promote fake facts and catastrophic negativity in the press. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jerusalem Demsas Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: "The Maternal-Mortality Crisis That Didn’t Happen" by Jerusalem Demsas https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/no-more-women-arent-dying-in-childbirth/678486/ The 2001 paper "Bad Is Stronger Than Good" https://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71516.pdf Derek on the complex science of masks and mask mandates https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/03/covid-lab-leak-mask-mandates-science-media-information/673263/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, liberals have deluded themselves into thinking that Donald Trump was always on the verge of some calamitous legal defeat. Robert Mueller was made into an icon of the left. But no charges were filed. The Russiagate theory had a lot of smoke, and even some fire, but it failed to put Trump in a courtroom. At this point, you could be forgiven for checking out entirely on the efforts to charge Trump with crimes, since they all seem to end the same way. Without an indictment. If that’s going to change, it will largely rest on the decision making of one man: Merrick Garland, the attorney general of the United States. In a recent essay for The Atlantic, staff writer Frank Foer spent hours talking to Garland to understand who he is, how he thinks, and how his approach to law could help us predict the next chapter of the Trump legal saga. Foer comes away with a big prediction: The indictment of Trump is now "inevitable." And he’s here to tell us why. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Frank Foer Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom joins the show to talk about how the hybrid work revolution is going, and how the weakened connection between work and home continues to change where Americans live, how they travel, how they spend their time, how they raise their kids, and even how much time they spend combing their hair (survey says: less!). 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: Nicholas Bloom Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is the 100th episode of Plain English! I don’t know how that’s possible. Thanks to all of you who have listened. This has been a ton of work and a ton of fun. I’m still figuring out what this show is; how to balance news and tech gossip and big society questions and war coverage. There are days I think I know exactly what I’m doing and days I think I know even less than when I started out. And I just want to say to all the folks who have, on any medium, offered negative feedback or positive feedback: I’m reading it. Today, we're joined again by our first-ever guest, Kevin Roose from the 'New York Times,' to talk about Elon vs. Twitter and the deep implications of the year's astonishing breakthroughs in AI. 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: Kevin Roose Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices