The NBA’s vibes have been unusually awful recently. There has been widespread hand-wringing about the homogenization of modern offenses and the league’s notoriously weak regular-season TV ratings. A tanking crisis saw about a third of teams purposely try to lose games in a race to secure the top pick in the 2026 draft. A barrage of gambling scandals took out a head coach and several players. And the playoffs have brought relentless complaining from fans about foul-baiting and flopping, tactics that have often been rewarded by the referees.
At the center of this is Adam Silver, who was once the most popular and celebrated commissioner in all of sports. In recent years, though, his reputation has soured. Fans have begun to wonder: Why isn’t he addressing the problems that everyone else seems to see? Is the right guy running the league?
In a profile of Silver for The Atlantic, the journalist Tim Alberta wrote, “Companies take on the personality of their leader.” Today, Alberta joins Derek to talk about the state of the modern NBA, whether the league has optimized the fun out of basketball, and what the impact is when a sport stops being treated like a game that exists to remind people that there is more to life than work and money.

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Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Tim Alberta
Producer: Chris Sutton
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman
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Over the past century, attitudes about gender roles have become one of the clearest dividing lines in the country. Many Republicans, both men and women, say men are getting a raw deal in modern America. Many Democrats see that claim as completely off base.

So where does that split come from, and why has it become so central to politics?

Journalist Helen Lewis calls this emerging worldview “masculinism,” an ideology that pushes back against feminism and reflects a broader nostalgia for traditional gender roles. Today, Lewis joins Derek to talk about the rise of this phenomenon and what it reveals about the growing schism in American politics.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Helen Lewis

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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On his 40th birthday, Derek Thompson takes a step back and looks at how his thinking on the national debt has changed. Back when he first covered fiscal policy, concern about government borrowing was mostly a conservative position, with many liberals arguing it was overblown.

That’s starting to shift.

The U.S. now spends far more than it brings in, and the gap is still growing. For the first time, interest payments on the debt have surpassed military spending. And deficits that once rose during crises like the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic haven’t really come back down.

So what changed, and how worried should we be?

Derek is joined by economist Justin Wolfers to walk through the basics of the federal budget, the evolving debate around the national debt, and why more economists are starting to take persistent deficits seriously.

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Justin Wolfers

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Fertility rates are collapsing around the world. In rich countries and poor ones, in secular societies and religious ones, people are having fewer children than ever before. Some explanations focus on economic factors like housing costs, childcare costs, and student debt. Others point to a harder-to-measure, broader sense of uncertainty about the future.

At the same time, economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde thinks we are underestimating how big a deal this really is. In his view, only two forces will truly shape the future of human history in this century: artificial intelligence and fertility, and changes are already underway.

Today, Fernández-Villaverde joins Derek to talk about the global fertility decline, why it is happening across so many different societies, and why he believes this shift could reshape economics, culture, and the future of civilization.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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For the past few years, Silicon Valley executives and economists have warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out millions of jobs. Some companies have even blamed AI for layoffs. But what if the AI job apocalypse isn’t actually happening?

Today, Derek talks to economist Alex Imas about the growing gap between the rhetoric around AI-related job loss and the facts. Despite widespread fears of mass unemployment, surveys show most executives expect AI to create jobs or have little impact on hiring. Even employment in software engineering (one of the fields thought to be most vulnerable to AI) continues to grow.

Derek and Alex discuss why automation fears persist despite contradictory evidence, the history of technological disruption, and why AI may not be destroying work as much as it is simply redirecting us toward entirely new industries and opportunities.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Alex Imas

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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America is richer than ever. Unemployment is low. Wages are high. According to traditional metrics, the economy looks strong. So why are Americans feeling so bad?

Today, Derek talks with bestselling author Morgan Housel and journalist David Wallace-Wells about what Derek calls the “Tragic Twenties”: the strange and sudden collapse in American happiness that began during COVID and never really stopped.

What's behind the country’s emotional downturn? Inflation and the lingering psychological effects of the pandemic are certainly part of the story. But so are collapsing trust in institutions, rising social isolation, the negativity feedback loop of social media, and the feeling that we’re living through one crisis after another. Derek, Morgan, and David unpack why the wealthiest society in history still feels deeply adrift and what this happiness recession says about the future of American life.

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

Host: Derek Thompson
Guests: Morgan Housel and Derek Wallace-Wells
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

Links: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-get-so

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Hard to detect and almost impossible to treat, pancreatic cancer has long been one of medicine’s most ruthless killers. For decades, it’s been the cancer that science couldn’t crack. But that might be starting to change.

Recently, cancer researchers have announced a series of breakthroughs that, taken together, sound almost too good to be true: a drug that targets the “undruggable” gene behind most pancreatic tumors, a personalized mRNA vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognize pancreatic cancer as an enemy, and, now, an AI program that can spot the elusive disease years before doctors typically find it.

So is this breakthrough a real turning point? Or another case of medical hype outrunning reality?

On today’s episode, Dr. Ajit Goenka of the Mayo Clinic joins Derek to walk through the science behind the latest advances in cancer detection and what they could mean for the future of health care. They discuss Dr. Goenka’s new research using artificial intelligence to detect pancreatic cancer earlier than ever before … and whether machines might soon see what doctors can’t.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Dr. Ajit Goenka

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Freedom is one of the few ideas everyone agrees on. Surely more choice and autonomy is a good thing, right? But what if our endless pursuit of freedom is actually making us more anxious, less creative, and holding us back from reaching our full potential?
Today, Derek Thompson talks with bestselling author David Epstein about the surprising upside of constraints. After arguing for breadth in 'Range,' Epstein’s new book, 'Inside the Box,' makes the opposite case: that limits and rules can actually unlock creativity and satisfaction. They explore why more options don’t always make us happier, and how too many possibilities can lead to paralysis.
As Søren Kierkegaard warned, anxiety may be the price of too much freedom. It’s the dizziness that comes from keeping every option open. So in a world obsessed with maximizing choice and opening doors, this episode makes the case for something radical: closing some.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: David Epstein

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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For nearly a decade, critics have predicted that this would be the moment Trumpism finally fractures - January 6, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, endless internal feuds, even Trump’s online beef with Pope Leo. And yet the movement endures. Derek is joined by Ross Douthat to unpack the contradictory coalition Trump has built: Christian conservatives who overlook increasingly pagan behavior, anti-establishment populists who embrace strongman bullying, MAHA health obsessives that ignore their leader's diet of exclusively processed food … What holds this movement together and could the Iran War finally tear it apart?

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Ross Douthat

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Hollywood is in the middle of a triple crisis. You can measure it in tickets, jobs, and ideas.

Start with tickets. The best year for the movie business this century was 2002, when Americans and Canadians bought 1.6 billion tickets, or about five per person. Last year, Americans bought half that number. Eighty years ago, the typical American went to the movies twice a month. Now they go about twice a year.

Then there are the jobs. Studios are making fewer movies and shows than they did just a few years ago, and the projects they green-light are increasingly shot overseas, where governments hand out generous subsidies. According to The Wall Street Journal, employment in Hollywood has fallen 30 percent since 2022 across the hundreds of trades—actors, carpenters—that make film and television possible.

And then there's the creativity problem. It's not just that studios keep reheating 20th-century IP. The stars are getting older, too. Among the 14 most important movie stars of this decade, the average age is 57. Half are over 60. None is under 45. Even many of Gen Z's favorite movie stars—the Rock, Ryan Reynolds, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington—had hit films before Gen Z was born.

Today's guest is Sean Fennessey, host of The Ringer's The Big Picture and author of the new Substack Projections. In an essay published this week, Sean argues that all the gloom is missing something real: Attendance is perking up, young stars are breaking through, and the auteurs we've followed for 20 years are ascending to the center of the culture. Today, Sean and Derek talk about the new rules of Hollywood and what they tell us about the changing winds of American culture.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Sean Fennessey

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced an AI model so capable and so dangerous that it decided not to release it to the public.

The model, codenamed Mythos, could autonomously infiltrate computer systems around the world, exploit security vulnerabilities, conceal its own reasoning, and fabricate false explanations for what it was doing. Anthropic instead shared it with a small consortium of companies to help them find their own cybersecurity flaws.

You could be forgiven for some skepticism. Is this a genuine safety call, or Anthropic’s way of marketing its own power? But independent benchmarks suggest Mythos is real: On the Epoch Capabilities Index, which aggregates 40 separate AI evaluations, it represents the biggest single leap in model performance in three years.

That story is one of two major phase shifts happening simultaneously in AI right now. The first: from racing to release, to treating your own product as too dangerous to publish. The second: from a story about demand scarcity—is anyone actually paying for this stuff?—to supply scarcity, where companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on AI agents and the hyperscalers still can’t keep up.

Today’s guest is New York Times columnist and Hard Fork co-host Kevin Roose. We talk about Mythos, China, the road to AGI, and why the last few weeks might be the most consequential month in AI since the release of ChatGPT.

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

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Kevin Roose

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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