Plain English with Derek Thompson

America is sicker than ever. That’s what the data says, anyway. Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses have soared. Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, bipolar disorder among American youth grew by a factor of 40, while the number of children diagnosed with ADHD increased by a factor of 7. Rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression have soared, too. Perhaps in previous decades doctors missed millions of cases of illness that we’re now catching. Or perhaps, as the New York Times writer David Wallace Wells has written, “we are not getting sicker—we are attributing more to sickness.” We used to be merely forgetful. Now we have ADHD. We used to lack motivation. Now we’re depressed. We used to be introverted. Now we experience social anxiety. Today’s guest is Suzanne O’Sullivan, a neurologist and the author of 'The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker'. O’Sullivan argues that too many doctors today are pathologizing common symptoms in a way that’s changing the experience of the body for the worse. When doctors turn healthy people into patients, it’s not always clear if they’re reducing the risk of future disease or introducing anxiety and potentially harmful treatments to a patient who's basically fine. Rather than see the age of diagnosis as something all good or all bad—a mitzvah or a disease—I want to see it as a social phenomenon, something that is good and bad and all around us. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Suzanne O’Sullivan Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

9 Sep 57min

In the second of our two-episode series on Donald Trump, economics, and power, we talk to Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins. Farrell has written extensively on how the United States has in the last few years weaponized its economic power to force other countries to do its bidding, through sanctions or the freezing of bank accounts. Today, we consider the many ways that Trump has weaponized the office of the presidency against American interests and how his authoritarian style matches up against China as both countries race toward superintelligence. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Henry Farrell Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

5 Sep 52min

Today is the first of two interviews this week trying to answer this question: What is Trumponomics? From the 1980s to the 2010s, it was generally assumed that Republicans and Democrats had settled differences in economic policy. Republicans wanted lower taxes and less spending on welfare. Democrats wanted higher taxes and more social spending. Reality didn’t always conform to those differences. George H.W. Bush famously raised some taxes, and Bill Clinton famously reduced some welfare spending. But generally speaking, the socialists voted for Democrats and the corporate libertarians and free-market folks found their home in the GOP. What’s interesting about Trump's theory of power and economics is that he doesn’t just scramble this divide. He obliterates it. Some of Trump’s measures are so classically Republican, you could imagine the ghost of Ronald Reagan signing off on them. After all, his signature legislative accomplishment in both terms are two huge corporate income tax cuts. But when Trump announced that the government was taking a stake in Intel, Bernie Sanders cheered the news and Gavin Newsom called him a socialist. Trump has single-handedly instituted the biggest tariffs in 100 years—tariffs that are so unusual and extralegal that a federal court just ruled that most of them are, in fact, against the law. He’s waging war on the Federal Reserve, grabbing at an institution that has historically enjoyed independence when it comes to setting interest rates and managing monetary policy. Trumponomics is capitalist and socialist; it’s obsessed with defeating China and also obsessive about copying China; it’s sometimes focused on keeping America from getting ripped off and sometimes focused on issues so personal they have nothing to do with the national interest at all. Today’s guest is Greg Ip, the chief economics commentator at The Wall Street Journal. According to Greg, the best way to see clearly what Trump is up to is to see his economic policy as what he calls “state capitalism.” If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Greg Ip Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

3 Sep 49min

Memory is the glue of life. Without it, our focus softens, our experience of the world blurs, and our identities melt away. But as people age, their memory declines. Many billions of dollars have been spent to understand the biological basis of dementia and to devise a cure. In most cases, they have failed spectacularly. But what if, rather than study the brains of people with advanced memory loss, we instead studied the brains of people with the opposite condition: extraordinary memory and brain health in old age? For the past few decades, Sandra Weintraub, a scientist at Northwestern University, has been part of a team studying the brains of "super-agers," people 80 and older who have the memory ability of people in their 50s. In a new paper published this year to considerable fanfare, she found that super-agers didn't have much in common. They didn't share a diet, or an exercise regimen, or a set of maladies or medications. One thing, however, united them: their social relationships. Today's guest is Sandra Weintraub. We talk about the science of memory and the brain and the protective benefit of social connection for our minds and ourselves. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Dr. Sandra Weintraub Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

27 Aug 41min

Today’s pod is about the economic story of the moment. It’s about new technology that supporters claim will transform the U.S. economy, an infrastructure build-out unlike anything in living memory that demands enormous natural resources, fears that corporate giants are overbuilding something that can never return its investment, an uncomfortable closeness between corporations and the state, fears that oligarchs are screwing the public to generate unheard-of levels of private wealth. Just a small catch. This show isn’t about the present or AI in 2025. It’s about the railroads and the late 1800s. To be sure, everything I just said could plausibly be the introduction to a podcast about artificial intelligence. Last quarter, the growth of AI infrastructure spending—on chips, data centers, and electricity—exceeded the growth of consumer spending. The economic researcher and writer Paul Kedrosky has written that as a share of GDP, AI is consuming more than any new technology since the railroads in the late 1800s. There is no question that the transcontinentals transformed America. They populated the West; practically invented California; turned America into a coast-to-coast dual-ocean superpower; revolutionized finance; made possible the creation of a new kind of corporation; launched what the historian Alfred Chandler called the managerial revolution in American business; forged a new relationship between the state and private enterprise; minted a generation of plutocrats, from Jay Gould to Leland Stanford of Stanford University; galvanized the anti-monopoly movement; and completely reoriented the way Americans thought about time and space. “The transcontinentals ... came to epitomize progress, nationalism, and civilization itself,” the historian Richard White wrote in his epic history of the transcontinentals, 'Railroaded.' But he continued: “They created modernity as much by their failure as their success.” Today’s return guest is Richard White. Our acute subject is the transcontinental railroads and the 19th century. But our deeper subject is the nature of transformative technology and the messy business of building it. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

20 Aug 55min

According to analysis by Financial Times writer John Burn-Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to Americans’ personalities in the last decade. Longitudinal tests indicate that we’ve collectively become less extroverted, less agreeable, and more neurotic. The most significant thing Burn-Murdoch found is that measures of conscientiousness among young Americans appears to be in a kind of free fall. Today, John and I talk about his research. We discuss personality tests, the value of conscientiousness, and how the modern world might be scrambling our personalities by making us less interested in other people and more consumed with our own neurotic interiority. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: John Burn-Murdoch Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

13 Aug 47min

Last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest GDP report. It contained a startling detail. Spending on artificial intelligence added more to the U.S. economy than consumer spending last quarter. This is very quickly becoming an AI economy. I’m interested in how AI will change our jobs. But I’m just as curious about how it will change our minds. We’re already seeing that students in high school and college are using AI to write most of their essays. What do we lose in a world where students sacrifice the ability to do deep writing? Today’s guest is Cal Newport, the author of several bestsellers on the way we work, including 'Deep Work.' He is also a professor of computer science at Georgetown. One of the questions I get the most by email, in talks, in conversations with people about the news is: If these tools can read faster than us, synthesize better than us, remember better than us, and write faster than us, what’s our place in the loop? What skills should we value in the age of AI? Or, more pointedly: What should we teach our children in the age of AI? How do we ride this train without getting run over by it? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Calvin Newport Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

6 Aug 58min

Subscribe to Derek’s new Substack. In 1991, the median age of first-time homebuyers was 28. Now it’s 38, an all-time high. In 1981, the median age of all homebuyers was 36. Today, it’s 56—another all-time high. This is the hardest time for young people (defined, generously, up to 40!) to buy their first home in modern history. Derek talks about the history of how we got here and then brings on Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen to talk about the state of American housing today and how the national housing market has broken into “two Americas.” If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Conor Sen Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

30 Jul 42min