Plain English with Derek Thompson

Who is the most successful president in American history? George Washington secured American independence. Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and ended slavery. Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Depression, remade government, and won World War II. But if we define "success" as the ability to articulate your goals and achieve every single one of them, perhaps only one president in American history was ever perfectly successful. In 1845, James K. Polk, newly elected by a whisker-thin margin, confided to his friend George Bancroft the four goals of his four years in the White House. Acquire Oregon from Great Britain. Acquire California from Mexico. Reduce the tariff. Establish an independent treasury. Four years later, he'd done all this and more. As the historian Daniel Patrick Howe wrote, "Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States has ever had.” And that’s why Polk is the subject of today’s show. I don’t think another president in American history has so large a gap between his modern reputation and his actual achievement. There are two great biographies about Polk that I’ve read that have been published in the last 20 years. I’m very pleased that today, we have both authors on the show. Walter Borneman is the author of 'Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America.' And Robert Merry is the author of 'A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent_._' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Walter Borneman and Robert Merry Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the past month, chaos and confusion have gripped Washington and the federal government. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have served as an iron fist of the Trump administration—ransacking government agencies, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as they can get away with. Much of this work is plainly illegal. Every 12 hours, it seems, another federal judge rules that the Trump administration has exceeded its executive authority. Efficiency is a worthy goal, and some of the programs that Musk and his team cut may turn out to be wasteful. Still, the way Musk has gone about his work—destroying life-saving programs at USAID, mistakenly offering buyouts to nuclear assembly engineers and essential doctors with Veterans Affairs, slashing funds for important studies and data collection programs across government—suggests that his bureaucratic blitzkrieg isn't just illegal; it's careless and harmful. The U.S. deserves a theory of government more sophisticated than "F-ck around and find out." So, what would an effective DOGE look like? Today’s guests are Michael Geruso, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Tim Layton, a professor of health care policy at UVA. We explain why any sensible waste and fraud search-and-destroy effort should start with health care spending. Then we get very nerdy about waste and fraud in health care. Most importantly, we talk about trade-offs. It’s a myth that there is some pot of $10 billion just lying around, doing nothing, gathering dust. Every dollar of federal government spending goes to a person in a place doing a thing. And that means that every dollar we cut will have a recipient on the other end who is losing a dollar. Taking government efficiency seriously requires thinking about both sides of this equation: What do we get when we spend this dollar, and what do we lose when we take that dollar away? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Michael Geruso and Tim Layton Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time. It's about the decline of religion in America, the value of faith, the case for belief, and the rational reasons to believe in God. My guest is the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He is a Catholic conservative. From an identity checkbox standpoint, we are very different people. But Ross is one of my favorite writers from any point of the ideological spectrum. His new book is 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' and it begins with an extremely compelling description of Ross reading the feedback he’s getting at the Times, watching that feedback evolve from “You stupid idiot, how could you possibly believe in a magical man in the sky?” to “I think I’m missing something in my life, a religion-sized hole at the center of my community or myself. Can you help me find it?” We talk about his religious journey and mine, the history of religion in America, the popular misconception that science automatically rolled back religiosity, the rational, scientific case for the existence of God, why I find that case emotionally lacking, and the case for even secular people to believe in God. And, finally, I invite Ross to give me his single best case that Christianity is true. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ross Douthat Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why is it so hard to find a cure for Alzheimer’s? A simple answer is that the brain and its disorders are complicated. But as today’s guest, Charles Piller, writes, there’s another, more sinister factor at play. His new book, 'Doctored,' traces an incredible, true story of fraud, arrogance, and tragedy in the quest to cure Alzheimer’s. In the last few years, some of the most famous and revered neuroscientists in America have been accused of doctoring images in research related to Alzheimer’s and neuroscience—even as they raised tens of millions of dollars in funding based on this doctored science and set up clinical trials for thousands of patients based on these manipulated results. At the same time, a silent conspiracy of groupthink starved this field of research of fresh ideas, with catastrophic consequences. Piller explains how he broke the story of what might be this century's biggest scandal in American medical science. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles Piller Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fans of green energy like me face some inconvenient truths about the global energy picture. First, coal sounds like a dirty technology that the rich world is moving on from. But nearly 9 billion tons of coal were burned last year—an all-time high. Second, "peak oil" is a prediction that many analysts have thrown around in the past few years, but oil production is also near its all-time high. Third, we might not even be at peak wood: Global wood fuel production was higher in 2024 than in 1980. At the same time, I think the renewable energy revolution is proving to be its own unstoppable phenomenon. Solar and battery installations are still exploding upward, and whereas some skeptics worried that the earth wouldn’t be able to provide the essential elements and metals to build out a green energy system, those doubts seem, for the moment, overwrought. Lithium, which is one of the most important metals for battery production, has seen its resources double since 2018. So what we have is not a pretty picture but a messy one. A green energy boom matched with an enormous demand for fossil fuels, as billions of people around the world drive and eat and demand the middle-class lifestyle that is their right. Today’s guest is Nat Bullard, an independent energy analyst and the author of a new extraordinary report on the state of energy and decarbonization. We talk about everything: coal, oil, wood, and natural gas; the history of nuclear vs. solar in America; the solar and battery revolution of the 21st century; the political barriers to its growth; the rise of BYD in China; the flatlining of Tesla's growth; and the future of energy technology. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Nat Bullard Producer: Devon Baroldi Nat's report: https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wealth isn’t just about financial security, according to today’s guest, Sahil Bloom. It’s about time wealth (the freedom to control our own schedules), social wealth (deep relationships with family and friends), mental wealth (the space to think clearly about the most important questions in life), and physical wealth (health and vitality). Bloom’s new book, 'The 5 Types of Wealth,' is uncommonly wise and deep on the questions I care about most. Why is it so hard to make friends late in life? How can we build a life that combines freedom and control with duty and responsibility? What does it really mean to control our time? What’s the best career advice? I think Bloom is uncommonly good at a job that too many people try and very few people master: serving as a clearinghouse for truly excellent advice about being alive and being decent to other people. It’s a lesson we really need to hear these days. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Sahil Bloom Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the past few years, we've learned that GLP-1 drugs don’t just help with diabetes or increase people’s feelings of fullness to help them lose weight. They have broad effects on substance abuse and behavior. They even seem to help with otherwise incurable illnesses, like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. This month, a team of scientists studying 2 million patients in the Veterans Affairs medical system found that GLP-1s were associated with “a reduced risk of substance use and psychotic disorders, seizures, neurocognitive disorders (including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia), coagulation disorders (clotting), cardiometabolic disorders (like strokes and heart attacks), infectious illnesses and several respiratory conditions.” Today’s guest is a coauthor on the paper, Ziyad Al-Aly. He is a physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. We talk about his new paper, the steps he took to make sure his findings were trustworthy, why GLP-1 drugs might work so well, what they’re teaching us about the brain and body, how they’re scrambling our sense of where volition begins and where free will ends, and what scientists should do next with the revelation that these drugs have effects that go far beyond obesity and diabetes. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ziyad Al-Aly Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Al-Aly et al. on the effectiveness and risks of GLP-1 drugs [link] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, tech talk with an old friend of the pod, Kevin Roose of The New York Times, who is also host of the 'Hard Fork' podcast. This is a show about everything. And it’s going to remain a show about everything because I’m a little bit interested in everything. But one cost of that purposeful lack of narrow focus is that sometimes you fail to communicate the gravity of the important things that are happening in the world. And at the moment, I think some of the most important stories in the world are in tech—and more specifically, in the relationship between government and technology. A relationship that is closer now than it’s been in many decades. We begin with TikTok—the most popular source of news for Gen Z in America and the most downloaded mobile app in the world in 2024. Last year a bipartisan bill signed by Joe Biden demanded that the parent company of TikTok, which is the Chinese firm ByteDance, sell its American business or else face a ban. Well, today, TikTok is legally banned in America, and also in broad use, because Donald Trump—the man who called for banning the app in 2020—saved it in 2025 by essentially declaring that he won’t uphold the law. We then spend most of this episode talking about the crescendo of predictions from Silicon Valley that the AI frontier is nearing a breakthrough. In the past few weeks, members of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs have claimed that they are less than three years away from building AI agents that are, to borrow their language, better than humans at everything. I ask Kevin how widespread these predictions are, whether we should believe them, what it would mean if they’re right, why they might wrong, what’s the biggest bottleneck still standing in their way, and why it’s so hard for the news media to report responsibly on a story like this, where we’re asked to take seriously the economy-shifting potential of a technology that we can’t actually report on because it doesn’t actually exist. And then, because I’m also completely bewildered by the bonfires of corruption that are erupting in crypto-land, we close on crypto. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kevin Roose Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is the first episode of a little experiment we’re trying this year, a podcast within a podcast on history that we’re calling, simply enough, 'Plain History.' There are, I am well aware, a great number of history podcasts out there. But one thing I want to do with this show is to pay special attention to how the past worked. In this episode, for example, we're using the assassination of an American president to consider the practice of medicine in the 19th century. Our subject today is the bestseller 'Destiny of the Republic' by the historian Candice Millard, on the incredible life and absurd and tragic death of President James Garfield. In the summer of 1876, the United States celebrated its 100th birthday at the U.S. Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Of the millions of people who walked through the grounds, one was Garfield, who attended the centennial with his wife and six children. In four years' time, he would be elected president at a shocking and chaotic Republican convention. But at the time, he was a 44-year-old congressman known in Washington for being a rags-to-riches genius. Garfield was a perfect match for the centennial grounds, which were themselves a gaudy showcase of genius. In Machinery Hall, visitors could pay for a machine to embroider their suspenders with their initials. They could gaze at one of the world’s first internal combustion engines, a technology that would in the next 50 years remake the world by powering a million cars, tractors, and tanks. They could see the first Remington typewriter and Edison telegraph system. In the Main Exhibition Building, a little-known teacher for the deaf caused a riot with his science experiment. In one room, the teacher held up a little metal piece to his mouth and read Hamlet’s soliloquy into a transmitter. In a separate room, the emperor of Brazil, sitting with an iron box receiver pressed against his ear, heard each word—to be or not to be—reverberating against his eardrum. The teacher’s name was Alexander Graham Bell, and the instrument in question had three months earlier received a patent as the world’s first working telephone. A few yards away, a scientist named Joseph Lister was having much less success trying to explain his theories of antisepsis to a crowd of skeptical American doctors. He claimed that the same tiny organisms that Pasteur said turned grape juice into wine also turned our wounds into infestations. Lister encouraged doctors to sterilize wounds and to treat their surgical instruments with carbolic acid. But American doctors laughed off these suggestions. Dr. Samuel Gross, the president of the Medical Congress and the most famous surgeon in America, said, “Little if any faith is placed by any enlightened or experienced surgeon on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called carbolic acid treatment of Professor Lister.” American surgeons instead believed in “open-air treatment,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Here are three characters of a story: James Garfield, Alexander Graham Bell, and Lister’s theory of antisepsis. They were united at the 1876 centennial. They would be reunited again in five years, under much more gruesome circumstances, brought together by a medical horror show that would end with a dead president. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Candice Millard Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode has been a long time coming. For years, more scientists and health influencers have claimed that even moderate drinking does serious damage to one's health. As someone who likes being healthy and also loves a glass of wine (or scotch), Derek really wanted to understand this issue more deeply. This week, he published a long article in The Atlantic about his research on the health effects of moderate drinking—meaning one or two drinks a night. In today's episode, he breaks down his research process and conclusions, sharing audio from his interview with Canadian health researcher Tim Stockwell, who is one of the most prominent skeptics of the supposed benefits of moderate drinking. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Tim Stockwell Producer: Devon Baroldi Links Derek's original article in The Atlantic (free gift link!): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/moderate-drinking-warning-labels-cancer/681322/?gift=o6MjJQpusU9ebnFuymVdsD7vJ9S6Vd2LMCE-zROPKQs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share "The Battle Over What to Tell Americans About Drinking" in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/health/alcohol-dietary-guidelines.html "Alcohol and Cancer Risk 2025" The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/oash-alcohol-cancer-risk.pdf A meta-analysis in The Lancet on alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(18)31310-2/fulltext Vinay Prasad on alcohol and the meta-analysis https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/what-is-the-truth-about-alcohol-consumption Emily Oster on alcohol and health https://parentdata.org/alcohol-and-health/ Tim Stockwell, et al, meta-analysis on alcohol, 2023 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2802963 "Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28735-5 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With so many confusing narratives unfolding around a fire that is still raging out of control, I wanted to talk to somebody I knew and trusted to get stories like this right. Robinson Meyer is the founder and editor of Heatmap News and a former staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate news and related disasters. We talk about why this Los Angeles fire is so unusual, how it differs from most recent forest fires in California, the role of climate change, and what Los Angeles and other places can do to protect people from the inevitability of future disasters. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Robinson Meyer Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Could More Controlled Burns Have Helped? 5 Startups Working on LA Fires What Started The Fires? Why LA’s Fires Are Exceptionally Hard to Fight Does climate change make the Santa Ana winds worse? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My new feature for The Atlantic magazine is called "The Anti-Social Century." It's a long article that revolves around a simple point: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. This surging solitude is changing our personalities, our politics, our culture, and our relationships. On this episode, University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley joins the show to talk about why aloneness matters. We talk about his research on relationships and solitude, on why we need people in our lives, and why sometimes we disregard or misunderstand that need, and why "social fitness" is so critical to a good life. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Nick Epley Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy new year! And what better way to celebrate the freshly torn calendar page than by welcoming one of Derek's favorite writers to the show to tell us what's in store for the 2025 economy. Michael Cembalest is the chairman of market and investment strategy for JPMorgan Asset Management, and the author of the truly spectacular newsletter, 'Eye on the Market.' Today, we start with stocks and describe the truly historic—and historically unprecedented—dominance of the so-called Mag-7 tech giants. Then, we draw the connection between Big Tech’s historic run and the surge of AI spending. After a discussion on the history and future of nuclear power in America, we do a pit stop on the European economy, where we evaluate the continent’s tradeoff between safety and growth, and move on to China to disentangle that economy’s slowdown. Finally, we connect it all back to a Trump agenda that is a fascinating brew of old-fashioned Reaganite deregulation, newfangled crypto enthusiasm, mid-19th century tariff obsession, mid-20th century industrialization policy, and ... a bunch of other ingredients that I think I’ll just let Michael tell you about. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Michael Cembalest Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our final episode of the year is also my favorite annual tradition: conversations with scientists about the most important and, often, just plain mind-blowing breakthroughs of the previous 12 months. Today we’re talking about "organ clocks" (we'll explain) and other key biotech advances of 2024 with Eric Topol, an American cardiologist and author who is also the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. But first, Derek attempts a 'Plain English'-y summary of the most confusing thing he's ever covered—QUANTUM COMPUTING—with a major assist from theoretical computer scientist Scott Aaronson from the University of Texas at Austin. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Scott Aaronson and Eric Topol Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why do Americans die younger than citizens of other rich countries? The most important reason is that life in America is inexcusably dangerous. The U.S. has more fatalities from gun violence, drug overdoses, and auto accidents than just about any other similarly rich nation, and its obesity rate is about 50 percent higher than the European average. Put this all together, and the U.S. is rightly considered a “rich death trap” for its young and middle-aged citizens. That’s the bad news. Now here’s the good news. In the past 12 months, quietly and without much media fanfare, the government reported that drug deaths declined, murders declined, traffic fatalities declined, and the standard measure of obesity declined. This inside straight of good news has never happened before in the 21st century—and perhaps decades before that. Today’s guest is Charles Fain Lehman. He’s a fellow at the Manhattan Institute whose expertise is unpacking complex trends in the most gruesome areas, like drugs, murder, and death, in America. Today, he explains why the U.S. seems to be experiencing a sort of mysterious health wave and whether we should expect it to last. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles Fain Lehman Producer: Devon Baroldi Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/violence-obesity-overdoses-health-covid/681079/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So, here’s a scenario: It’s Monday. And you open up whatever calendar or planner or to-do list you use to organize the essential activities of the upcoming week. There’s a large project due Thursday. And an important meeting Wednesday. Your nine-to-five is chockablock with meetings, and your kid has a school function Tuesday, and there are holiday gifts to buy before Friday, and just when you’re pretty sure your week couldn’t possibly take one more featherweight of responsibilities, the HVAC unit sputters to a stop, requiring a call to the local heating and cooling guys, which obliterates four hours of Monday. You can tell yourself that this week is cursed. Or you can tell yourself the truth: Feeling an imbalance between the time you have and the time you want to have isn’t really a curse at all. It’s a bit more like ... the definition of being alive. To see life clearly in this way is what I’ve come to think of as Oliver Burkeman brain. Oliver is the author of the books 'Four Thousand Weeks' and 'Meditations for Mortals.' Today, in what's become a holiday tradition of sorts, we bring back Oliver to chat about doing more by doing less, the dubious benefits of scheduling, and the freedom that comes from accepting our limitations. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Oliver Burkeman Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot to death outside a hotel in Manhattan by a young man motivated by rage at the insurance industry. His rage is clearly felt widely. In the aftermath of the killing, many people seemed to delight in the man’s assassination. Their reaction was a grotesque illustration of something real: There is an enormous amount of anger and frustration about the state of American health care. And there ought to be. The U.S. is the most expensive health care system in the world, while for many people it delivers bad care at exorbitant prices. But anger is not always a signal of accuracy. And while some of the most popular reasons to be furious at American health care are based on truth, many are based on misunderstandings and myths—especially about the insurance system. This week, I wanted to present a calm and informed conversation with a health care expert to walk me through what I consider the biggest health care questions of the moment. Why are American health care costs so high? How much are insurers to blame? How do other countries handle health care differently? What can we learn from them? And what, if anything, should make us optimistic about the future of American health care? Today we have two guests. First we have Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at MIT and a key architect of several health care laws, including the 2006 Massachusetts health care reform and the Affordable Care Act. Jon walks me through the key drivers of health inflation and American anger at the health care system. The second, David Cutler, is an economics professor at Harvard who served as senior health care adviser for Barack Obama; he helps us think comparatively about the weaknesses and strengths of the U.S. health system and what reforms could help Americans live longer and healthier lives. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Jonathan Gruber and David Cutler Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The crypto industry seems poised for a new golden age. But what exactly does that mean? Who would benefit? And, oh by the way, what does this technology do other than serve as a set of assets to bet to the moon? I have lots of questions about the state of crypto right now. Last week, Bitcoin traded above $100,000 for the first time in history. Its price has skyrocketed since Donald Trump’s win, as a wave of investors bet that the next four years will mark a new renaissance. And this isn’t just a time for optimism. It’s also a time for recrimination. In the last few weeks, several major tech figures, including the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have condemned democrats for what they describe as an illegal war on crypto. Austin Campbell is finance vet, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, and the founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting. Today, we talk about the purported war on crypto, starting with the origins of "debanking" practices under Obama; we talk about why crypto now seems like a majority-republican technology in an industry that has historically been democratic; we talk about the biggest use cases of crypto around the world; and Austin tells me why he thinks many people in the industry still aren't thinking clearly about the future of finance. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Austin Campbell Producer: Mike Wargon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the last decade, several major findings in social psychology have turned out to be hogwash—or, worse, even fraud. This has become widely known as psychology's "replication crisis." Perhaps you have heard of power poses—based on a study finding that subjects reported stronger “feelings of power” after they posed, say, with their hands on their hips for several minutes. But that finding did not replicate. Or perhaps you have heard of ego depletion—the more famous assertion that, when people make a bunch of decisions, it exhausts their ability to make future decisions. Again: did not replicate. “There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years,” social psychologist Adam Mastroianni has written. “We’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers, and then what? The stack of papers just gets taller? I’ve never come up with satisfying answers. But now I finally understand why.” Today’s episode features two interviews. First, I talk to Adam about his big-picture critique of his own field: how psychology too often fails as a science, and what it can do better. Second, we speak with journalist Dan Engber from The Atlantic, who has been reporting on a billowing scandal in psychology that has enveloped several business school stars—and raised important questions about the field. What is psychology for? What would progress in psychology mean? And how can this field—which might be the discipline I follow than any other in academia—become more of a science? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Engber Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: “Is psychology going to Cincinnati?” by Adam Mastroianni https://www.experimental-history.com/p/is-psychology-going-to-cincinnati "I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is" by Adam Mastroianni https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss#footnote-anchor-3-136506668 “The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger” by Daniel Engber https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emily Oster, professor of economics at Brown University, joins the show to talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his theories about fluoride and vaccines, and how the media and science community should treat the most controversial topics. This is a new age of science and information, where trust seems to be shifting from institutions like the FDA and CDC to individuals like RFK Jr. and Oster, and I consider her a model of public health communication. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Emily Oster Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices