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
369 episodes transcribedQuagmire. Regime change. Conquest. Empire. World War III. Derek considers five ways that the war in Ukraine could end with Paul Poast, a professor of...
Derek explains why three years—1989, 2008, and 2014—are the key to understanding why Putin is willing to take a massive risk in invading Ukraine. Then...
All-star VC Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital joins the show to talk about picking winners and losers, tech's rough start to the year, and his four favorite m...
Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game. Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak. Jerry Rice's gazillion receiving records. Which of these athletic achievements i...
What if I told you that the anti-vaccination trucker protests in Canada weren’t principally about vaccines or truckers (or even Canada)? The Atlantic’...
Derek goes deep with bestselling author Dan Pink on his new book, 'The Power of Regret.' This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the...
Kevin Roose of The New York Times returns to our pod, which is owned by Spotify, to talk about Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is exclusively licensed by S...
Jason Furman is a Harvard professor who served as a top economist for the Obama administration. More than just about anybody Derek spoke to last year,...
They’re the six largest tech companies in the world. What’s the most interesting thing about each of them? Shira Ovide, author of the On Tech newslett...
Americans owe $1.7 trillion in student loans, and some Democrats think the time has come to cancel this burden. Derek shares 10 big student-loan facts...
Morgan Housel, the bestselling author of ‘The Psychology of Money’ and a partner at Collaborative Fund, is back to talk Bitcoin, Peloton, tech stocks,...
Legendary journalist James Fallows joins to discuss the filibuster wars, Democrats’ Voting Rights Act, the political outlook for Joe Biden and the Dem...
Do movie theaters have a future? What should Disney do with ESPN? And is anybody watching Peacock? Derek’s favorite entertainment-media analyst Rich G...
Okay, almost everybody. The Biden administration was wrong. Many critics of the Biden administration were also wrong. The Federal Reserve was wrong. I...
Derek talks about the rise of the "Vaxxed and Done" movement before reviewing the latest omicron data with John Burn-Murdoch, data superstar at the Fi...
Let’s kick off the new year with a bit of techno-optimism! After a miserable start to this decade, we can still have a Roaring Twenties. In this episo...
David Frum joins Derek to talk about rising and falling polarization by race, gender, education, and place—and what it tells us about America's strang...
Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund partner and author of the bestseller 'The Psychology of Money,' joins the pod to debate what we're getting wrong abo...
New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose is back to talk about the Age of Elon, why tech’s most famous founders are acting so weird, and why I’m wron...
Derek is obsessed with the trial of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes—and he hopes you are too. Days away from the trial's end, Derek and Re...
