The AI buildout continues to break records, as the hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions of dollars into chips and data centers, even as investors punish their stock prices. But the revenue side of the ledger is showing signs of takeoff. In the last few weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have added billions of dollars of cash, on their way to becoming two of the fastest growing companies in history.

Last year, Derek was convinced that AI was on its way to being one of the biggest bubbles in modern capitalism’s history. But the torpid rise of AI agents is starting to change his mind. So he wanted to bring someone on to test his evolving theory.

The investor and writer Paul Kedrosky returns to the show to make his own case even more firmly: AI is a bubble, and the evidence is all around us.

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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Check out Paul's podcast 'The Nick, Dick and Paul Show' on YouTube and Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/@nickdickpaul

https://open.spotify.com/show/6mxUS2hFE2hdaNx1sjhdYu?si=67add32695c546bf

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Paul Kedrosky

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Why do placebo effects work, even when patients know that they're taking a sugar pill? How do "nocebo" effects work, and why do some people hold onto beliefs that they suspect might bring them pain and suffering? What do the major world religions have to teach secular athletes and workers about the power of belief, and what does the psychological research tell us about the benefits of prayer, even for those who don't believe in God? Nir Eyal, bestselling author of the new book Beyond Belief, joins the show to talk about the research behind how our beliefs shape our lives.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Nir Eyal

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Today’s open is adapted from Derek’s Substack essay “If Placebos Work So Well, Why Not Prescribe Sugar Pills For Everything?”

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The Strait of Hormuz is the tiny bottleneck that could destabilize the global economy. As a critical passageway for crude oil, natural gas, and critical inputs for fertilizer, computer chips, and plastic, this small stretch of water is a tiny chokepoint for global trade, and the war in Iran has all but shut it down. What does this mean for the U.S. economy and other countries around the world?  Geopolitical analyst Rachel Ziemba joins the show to discuss.

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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Rachel Ziemba

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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What happens when the two biggest stories in the world—the Trump White House and the development of advanced artificial intelligence—collide? Well, nothing good, apparently. When contract negotiations broke down between the Pentagon and Anthropic, a leading AI lab, the Department of War took the extraordinary step of labeling Anthropic a "supply chain risk," a designation typically reserved for Chinese companies suspected of spying on American technology.

It’s not just liberals like me that found this announcement jarring. The technology writer Dean Ball—who served as Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House as recently as last summer—said the decision amounted to a nearly tyrannical attack on private property. (After all, if the government can walk up to your company, make you a deal, and destroy your company if you say no, that certainly sounds like a world in which the state can destroy whatever it trains its eyes on.)

So, I wanted to talk to Dean about what he sees—and why he thinks this episode is so important, and so terrifying. Today, we talk about the difference between Biden and Trump’s approach to artificial intelligence before diving into the Anthropic mess, and pulling out of it the bigger story, according to Dean: that Trump’s scattershot AI policy is just the latest sign that AI’s capabilities are growing faster than many people want to admit—this technology is going somewhere fast, and the the American government simply is not prepared for where it’s taking us.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Dean Ball

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Donald Trump’s polling has continued to edge down week after week. And yet approval of the Democratic Party is still stuck near its all-time low, according to Gallup and other surveys.

One interpretation of these polls is that the deep unpopularity of the party is an albatross around the neck of Democratic candidates. But there’s another interpretation that I think is more interesting—and perhaps more true. The fact that the party has no clearly defined national leader, and no clearly defined “brand” (sorry), is an opportunity for young Democrats to define themselves as individuals. Rather than act like a congregation all singing from the same hymnal, they can experiment, disagree, and adapt their message to their electorate. And that might ultimately prove to be a strength of the party heading into the 2026 midterms rather than a weakness.

Senator Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) joins the show to talk about the Iran war, immigration, affordability vs. aspiration, and the future of the Democratic Party.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Ruben Gallego
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Dramatic regime change. Moderate regime evolution. A calamitous regional conflict. Or … no change at all. Today we consider how the Iran conflict might evolve following the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei with Karim Sadjadpour, an American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Karim Sadjadpour
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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The modern world swims in numbers: work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics, social media metrics. Sometimes the quantification of life can make things better. But very often, I think they force us to play the games we can measure rather than the games we value. The quantified life has become a modern religion: a system of values that takes us over and keeps us from living the life we want.

Today’s guest is the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. He is the author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. We talk about metrics, the games of life, and how to listen to the parts of ourselves that cannot be reduced to numbers.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: C. Thi Nguyen

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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The GLP-1 drug revolution has taken the medicine world by storm. I’ve done several episodes on the science of GLP-1s. But we’ve never done an episode like this before, where we talk to one of the most important people in charge of guiding the GLP-1 drug revolution.

Our guest is Dave Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. First we talk about what makes the GLP-1 drug category special and the science that Lilly is doing to improve these drugs. Then, we talk about the pharmaceutical industry more broadly. How it works. How it could work better. And I don’t shy away from the question that I think Pharma CEOs need to take much more seriously: If the pharmaceutical industry is theoretically more devoted than any other economic category to saving people’s lives, why do Americans distrust it more than any other industry in the entire economy?

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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: David Ricks
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Donald Trump suffered a huge blow Friday when the Supreme Court struck down the centerpiece of his economic policy: his vast system of tariffs. So, what happens now? Harvard’s Jason Furman explains the implications for the U.S. economy, consumers, global trade, and Trump’s strategy of centralizing power in the executive branch and using trade policy as a means of wringing concessions out of other counties.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Jason Furman
Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In the mid-20th century, a group of media and communications scholars proposed that the shift from spoken to written language—from orality to literacy—transformed our politics, our media, our social relations, and even our sense of consciousness. Today we’re undergoing another shift: from a literate culture to something stranger—a post-literate world awash in social media and digital communications in which oral traditions are making a comeback. Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, the cohost of the Odd Lots podcast, has called this one of the most important trends in the world. Today he explains how he got hooked on orality theory and why it’s the skeleton key that unlocks so many oddities of the modern world.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Joe Weisenthal

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In his epic cover story for The Atlantic this month, staff writer Josh Tyrangiel spoke to dozens of economists, workers, tech CEOs, and AI experts about the danger that artificial intelligence might pose to the labor force. Is AI developing the capacity to automate and even replace millions of white-collar jobs, as many technologists and some economists predict? Or is this a normal technology that, like previous generations of technology, will have a much slower effect on the workforce? We cover several scenarios before asking: Why does it seem like nobody in politics is paying close enough attention to this story?

Links: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/ai-economy-labor-market-transformation/685731/

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If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Josh Tyrangiel

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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