The Future of Entertainment, Part 1: Is Hollywood's Business Model Broken?

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

20 Jan 202353min

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

17 Jan 202347min

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

13 Jan 202340min

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

11 Jan 20231h

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

4 Jan 202344min

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

27 Dec 202249min

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

20 Dec 202253min

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

13 Dec 202258min