Plain English with Derek Thompson

The two biggest stories in the world right now—the war involving Iran and the rise of artificial intelligence—are, at their core, the same story: energy. The Iran conflict has become a war of competing energy blockades, with Iran squeezing American allies and America squeezing Iran. And AI is its own energy arms race, with tech companies scrambling not just for customers but for supply—chips, electricity, and data center capacity. What does it mean when every major story leads back to energy? Derek talks with energy analyst Nat Bullard about a world where power, in every sense of the word, is the thing everyone is fighting over.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Nat Bullard

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Link: https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

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Something weird is going on with the elevated unemployment rate for young people today, but no one knows what exactly it is.

For the last year, as the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has crept up ominously, one of the questions I’ve reported more deeply than any other is: Is AI replacing young workers’ jobs? To make a long story short: I initially thought yes, then some economists convinced me the answer was no, then some other economists convinced me the answer was yes, then some other people convinced me the answer was no. Clear as mud.

Today’s guest is Rogé Karma. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics. We talk about the labor market for new hires, why young college graduates are so miserable, and why economic vibes are worth paying attention to, even if the official statistics are pointing in another direction.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Rogé Karma

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links:
https://www.theatlantic.com/category/work-progress/
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/04/job-market-artificial-intelligence/686659/

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Perhaps you’ve heard the news: The U.S. is experiencing a religious revival, and it’s concentrated among young people, who are flocking back to the fold. The Economist announced that “the West has stopped losing its religion.” The Washington Post declared that “Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.”

This is shocking news. Since the 1990s, the share of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation has been skyrocketing. A reversal would be historic.

But today’s guest, Ryan Burge, tells us that the secular pause in America is much stranger than it looks. Ryan is the author of the sensational Substack Graphs About Religion, which is full of beautiful graphs about religion. So today’s episode will be a little special for folks on YouTube and Spotify. You’ll be able to see the beautiful graphs that Ryan makes that really hammer home his deepest conclusions.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Ryan Burge

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links: Practically this entire episode is inspired by the work on Ryan’s amazing Substack. You can subscribe here.

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The 1970s oil crisis changed the world in ways that many people forget today, from the transformation of American politics to the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. The Iran war of 2026 could have similarly global consequences, from the rise of China to changes in the future of war to the acceleration of the global renewables transition. Today, Australian investor and writer Alex Turnbull joins the show to discuss the most important and most surprising second-order effects of the war.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Alex Turnbull

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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One of the themes we’ve circled in the last few weeks is the way that the modern world can hijack our values. This principle was recently articulated by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in an episode called "How Metrics Make Us Miserable." Thi told us that he became a philosopher to answer the biggest questions in life but discovered, in grad school, that everybody around him mostly cared about numbers. Journals were ranked by status: numbers. The university departments were ranked by status: more numbers. Individual researchers had their own h-scores and other public quantifications of prestige: numbers, numbers, and numbers. And this cult of quantification completely took over his life. The internal value of “I want to answer the world’s deepest questions” becomes replaced by the external value of “make number go up.”

What do we call this extraordinary force for bulldozing our values, and replacing them with something outside of us—synthetic, bureaucratic, inauthentic? Let’s call it the machine. If you become a philosopher to discover the meaning of life but only work on the papers that you think will end up in journals scored highly by a bureaucracy you’ll never see … that’s the machine. If you’re a podcaster who wants to answer the most compelling questions in the world but ends up just focusing on rage-bait political news because that’s what YouTube fingers are clicking on, that’s the machine.

What’s the opposite of the machine? It’s something a little different than success. It’s success plus the ability to hold our values in the face of external systems that try to crush them. Today’s guest Brad Stulberg calls it: excellence. Today's podcast is about excellence.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Brad Stulberg

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links: The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg

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Today’s podcast is an interview with one of the cofounders of the AI company Anthropic, Jack Clark. One thing I’m trying to do with the subject of artificial intelligence is offer a balance of perspectives on an issue that tends to receive mostly one-sided coverage. Some people are certain that AI is a bubble; some are certain it is not. Some are certain that AI will destroy millions of jobs; some are certain that it will not. I want listeners of this show to feel like every time they hear an intelligent take on one side of this issue, the next episode they’ll hear a countervailing take. Two weeks ago, you heard the investor and writer Paul Kedrosky argue that AI was an economic bubble.

But if any single data point pierces that narrative, it’s this. From December 2025 to this month, March 2026, Anthropic has more than doubled its annual recurring revenue, from $9 billion to nearly $20 billion. According to several analysts, there is no record of any company growing this fast at this scale.

Now, I don’t need Jack Clark or anybody at Anthropic to read me a corporate statement about the company’s revenue growth. I can read that myself. What I wanted to do today is ask questions that only someone in Jack’s position can answer.

If Anthropic’s executives believe that AI might be as dangerous as nuclear weapons, what right does any private business have to build this sort of thing for profit?

How does the company balance its reputation as the industry leader in caution and safety with its other reputation as one of the fastest developers of this technology?

And if artificial intelligence has the capacity to produce a country of geniuses in a data center—as Anthropic’s CEO insists—why do Americans overall say they disapprove of artificial intelligence more than just about every other institution and individual in the world?

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Jack Clark

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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If you're a typical worker with a salary, you have almost no control over how much tax you owe. But if you own a company worth billions of dollars, the income tax is, in the words of my guest today, "largely optional." Countries around the world struggle to get billionaires to pay a higher tax rate than middle-income families.

Gabriel Zucman is one of the world's leading experts on tax inequality, the economist who first rigorously measured what U.S. billionaires actually pay—and he found that it's less, as a share of income, than what a middle-class American pays. He's advised Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on wealth tax proposals and recently published sweeping new research showing that the problem is global. Today, we get into the mechanics of billionaire tax avoidance, the history of failed wealth taxes, and whether the AI era is about to make all of this dramatically worse.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Gabriel Zucman

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In 2017, Americans legally bet about $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to $160 billion. Gambling hasn’t just taken over sports. It’s invaded culture, politics, and even international warfare. Bettors have already made millions of dollars wagering on the precise dates and locations of bombing campaigns in Iran, and journalists have been hounded for reporting on events that can lose bettors money.

It’s one thing to believe, as I do, that it would be foolish to entirely ban sports gambling in the U.S. It’s another to watch the warp-speed casino-ification of American life and not think, “Something has gone badly wrong here!” McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, joins the show to discuss his new cover story on how gambling conquered sports … and everything else.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: McKay Coppins

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Links: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-betting-app-addiction/686061/

Source for all photos: Getty Images

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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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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.

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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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