Plain English BEST OF: How Gen Z Sees the World

Donald Trump's second term has been a breakneck whirlwind: tariffs announced, tariffs unannounced, tariffs reannounced, allies threatened, and global coalitions ripped apart. What sort of a world are Trump and the White House trying to build? If you stand back from the brush strokes, and take in the full mural, it is possible to see something like a grand economic strategy. One way his chief economic advisers have put it is that we’re using America’s power in the 2020s as leverage to rebalance the global economy in a way that helps U.S. companies grow faster. There are several questions to ask about this stated economic strategy. One is whether or not it’s working. When tariffs designed to buoy the auto manufacturing economy lead instead to hundreds of layoffs among steelworkers getting walloped by trade wars—as they did this past week—it's hard to be confident that Trump's gambit is paying off. A very different question to ask is whether Trump’s economic strategy is _economic—_or, strictly speaking, strategic—at all. Much of our geopolitical agenda today seems to be a simple extrapolation of Donald Trump’s personality. His proclivity for audacious promises. His tactic of using leverage to squeeze counterparties. His preference for mano a mano deal-making over coalitional bargains. Today’s guests are Rogé Karma, a staff writer for The Atlantic, and Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard. We talk about the new world order Trump seems to be accelerating us toward. But we also talk about Trump himself, an unusual leader whose governance style often seems to have more to do with personal leverage than with policy. By evaluating the White House along both of these fronts, perhaps we can begin to see around the corner and understand what kind of a world, and what kind of a global economy, Donald Trump is pulling into view. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Rogé Karma and Jason Furman Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

31 Maalis 202554min

Corruption. Class wars. Technological splendor. The dawn of a new age of business and government. Rockefeller and Carnegie. The Gilded Age in America—roughly the 1870s through the early 1900s—was one of the most fascinating and misunderstood eras in our history. It seems like every week, news organizations claim that the U.S. is in a new Gilded Age. But what does that mean? What was the Gilded Age? Today’s guest is Richard White, award-winning historian and author of ‘The Republic for Which It Stands,’ a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. We talk about how corruption and monopoly and power worked during that period. We talk about Rockefeller and Carnegie and Morgan, and how these giants typified the era with their business genius and their thin sense of morality. We talk about how the monopolies of this era used the government, and the government used these monopolies. And we talk about how the movements that emerged from the Gilded Age invented the modern world. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Richard White Producer: Devon Baroldi P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

24 Maalis 202559min

Donald Trump is serving up a scarcity agenda to America. He and the White House say we don’t have an economy that works, so we might just need to accept a period of economic hardship. They say America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. They say America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, so we have to accept less trade. They say America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. America needs the opposite of this scarcity mindset to grow and thrive. We need an abundance agenda. But what does that mean? The answer to that question is in my new book, which I cowrote with the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. He is also today’s guest. We talk about ‘Abundance’ the book, and why it exists. And we talk about abundance the idea, and why it matters. (You can buy the book here!) If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ezra Klein Producer: Devon Baroldi P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

17 Maalis 20251h 19min

Generation Z, which was born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, has a unique economic, political, and cultural identity. In the 2024 election, Gen Z shifted strongly to the right. They are less likely than any previous generation to expect they’ll achieve the American Dream. Most of Gen Z graduated into a pandemic economy or entered high school during the school shutdown years.They have record-high rates of anxiety. They use their phone ... a lot. Defined by the forces of scarcity, phone-driven media, and global crisis, they are different. And their differences will drive the future of U.S. economics, politics, and culture. Today’s guest Kyla Scanlon is 27 years old, making her an older Gen Z representative. As a financial commentator on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack, she’s coined several terms—like the vibecession—that have made their way into the New York Times and federal economic reports. For a long time, I wanted to have a conversation about young people that doesn’t make me subject to a bunch of Reddit memes of Steve Buscemi holding the skateboard asking, “how do you do, fellow kids?” I wanted to get somebody smart, who was a member of Gen Z, and who also had conducted their own surveys of Gen Z. I’m very honored to have Kyla tell me about how young people today think and what they want. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kyla Scanlon Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

12 Maalis 202557min

Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. Cancer scientists are looking for a thousand perfect keys to pick a thousand stubborn locks. Today's episode is about the hardest lock of them all: pancreatic cancer. Cancer’s power lives in its camouflage. The immune system is often compared to a military search and destroy operation, with our T cells serving as the expert snipers, hunting down antigens and taking them out. But cancer kills so many of us because it looks so much like us. Pancreatic cancer is so deadly in part because it's expert at hiding itself from the immune system. Now, here’s the good news. This might be the brightest moment for progress in  pancreatic cancer research in decades—and possibly ever. In the past few years, scientists have developed new drugs that target the key gene mutation responsible for out of control cell growth. Recently, a team of scientists at Oregon Health and Science University claimed to have developed a blood test that is 85 percent accurate at early-stage detection of pancreatic cancer, which is absolutely critical given how advanced the cancer is by the time it’s typically caught. And last month, a research center at Memorial Sloan Kettering published a truly extraordinary paper. Using mRNA technology similar to the COVID vaccines, a team of scientists designed a personalized therapy to buff up the immune systems of people with pancreatic cancer. Patients who responded to the treatment saw results that boggle the mind: 75 percent were cancer-free three years after their initial treatment. Not just alive, which would be its own minor miracle. But cancer-free. The mRNA vaccine, administered within a regimen of standard drugs, stood up to the deadliest cancer of them all and won. Today’s guest is the head of that research center, the surgical oncologist Vinod Balachandran. The concept of a personalized cancer vaccine is still unproven at scale. But if it works, the potential is enormous. But again: Cancer does not exist, as a singular disease. Cancer is a category of rare diseases, many of which are exquisitely specific to the molecular mosaic of the patient. Cancers are personal. Perhaps in a few years, our cures for cancers will be equally personalized. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Vinod Balachandran Producer: Devon Baroldi Links:  Cancer Vaccine paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08508-4 P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: The Abundance Book Tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

7 Maalis 202547min

Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright fascinating all at the same time. TV and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips joins to describe his experience working with them. We talk about the job of modern music composition; why he's worried AI might eventually do much of his current job; the morass of AI copyright law; and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain whirring about the nature of creativity—how great new ideas, like songs, come to be in the first place. The line between stealing and inspiration in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And that is not just a memorable quote. Many of my favorite musicians were famous borrowers, to put it lightly. Some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs—such as "Whole Lotta Love"—were such obvious lifts that, after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff to the song credits. But analogies to music and art history also fall short to capture the weirdness of this moment. Neither Picasso nor Jimmy Page had access to an external technology whose deliberate function was to slurp up musical elements from millions of songs, store their essence in silicon memory, and serve them up in a kind of synthetic stir fry on an order-by-order basis. Musicians have been writing music with partners for decades, even centuries. What happens to music when that partner is a machine: Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a sad way, will super-intelligence make the future of music more average than ever? Links: WNYC: "How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music"  "In February's Cruel Light (Goodbye Luka)" Full AI song "L.A. Luka (I Wanna Puke-uh)" Full AI song  P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/abundance-tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

4 Maalis 202557min

Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers that they can’t read entire books. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. Why, with everything happening in the world, would I want to talk about reading? The business podcaster Joe Weisenthal has recently turned me on to the ideas of Walter Ong and his book 'Orality and Literacy.' According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It is a specific means of structuring society's way of thinking. In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition, mnemonics, and stories. Writing and reading, by contrast, fix words in place. One person can write, and another person, decades later, can read precisely what was written. This word fixing also allows literate culture to develop more abstract and analytical thinking. Writers and readers are, after all, outsourcing a piece of their memory to a page. Today, we seem to be completely reengineering the logic engine of society. The decline of reading in America is not the whole of this phenomenon. But I think that it’s an important part of it. Today we have two conversations—one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses. And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population and even among adults. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Rose Horowitch and Nat Malkus Producer: Devon Baroldi Links "The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books" "Testing Theories of Why: Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Achievement Trends"  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

28 Helmi 202559min

If you had to describe the U.S. economy at the moment, I think you could do worse than the word stuck. The labor market is stuck. The low unemployment rate disguises how surprisingly hard it is to find a job today. The hiring rate has declined consistently since 2022, and it's now closer to its lowest level of the 21st century than the highest. We’re in this weird moment where it feels like everybody’s working but nobody’s hiring. Second, the housing market is stuck. Interest rates are high, tariffs are looming, and home builder confidence is flagging. The median age of first-time homebuyers just hit a record high of 38 this year. Finally, people are stuck. Americans don't move anymore. Sixty years ago, one in five Americans moved every year. Now it’s one in 13. According to today’s guest, Yoni Appelbaum, the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, the decline of migration in the U.S. is perhaps the most important social fact of modern American life. Yoni is the author of the latest cover story for The Atlantic, "How Progressives Froze the American Dream," which is adapted from his book with the fitting title 'Stuck.' Yoni was our guest for our first sold-out live show in Washington, D.C., at Union Stage in February. Today, we talk about the history of housing in America, policy and zoning laws, and why Yoni thinks homeowners in liberal cities have strangled the American dream. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Yoni Appelbaum Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

25 Helmi 202554min